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BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. 



May 20, 1842, — J. E. Gray, Esq. F.R.S., &c.. President, in the chair. The fol- 

 lowing donations were announced. A specimen of sugar-cane from Madeira, presented 

 by Mr. James Halley. a specimen of Bupleurum tenuissimum, found at Highgate and 

 presented by Mr. W. Mitten (Phytol. 203) : British plants from Mr. G. H. K. Thwaites, 

 Mr. John Ellis and Mr. Edwin Lees : Books from the President. A paper was read 

 from Edwin Lees, Esq., F.L.S., " On the Flora of the Malvern Hills. Part 3 : being 

 a Sketch of the Cryptogamic Vegetation indigenous to the chain." 



Notwithstanding the limited extent of this narrow chain of hills, scarcely exceed- 

 ing nine miles in length, and rising to only 1500 feet in altitude, yet they offer almost 

 every variety of aspect and condition favourable to the development of Cryptogamic 

 vegetation. In fact the Malvern Hills, when considered only as a ridge, vsdthout refe- 

 rence to the country around them, are far more remarkable for their Aeotyledonous 

 than their Vascular productions. 



Commencing with the Northern termination of the hills in Cowleigh Park, several 

 miniature syenitic spurs here appear, abrupt and rocky yet prettily shaded with wood, 

 amidst deep glens and shaggy defiles overtopped by lateral steeps of limestone, amidst 

 whose gullies streamlets are ever gushing with musical intonation. From this " happy 

 valley " a verdant park-like glacis leads the wanderer up among the exposed treeless 

 turf, and rugged, jutting-out, lichened rocks of the End and North Hills, those of the 

 latter being more precipitous and remarkable than those of any other hill of the chain, 

 and boasting a great number of lapideous lichens. Between this hill and the Wor- 

 cestershire Beacon, a deep and winding valley extends, watered by bubbling stream- 

 lets, and abutted by moist dripping rocks on the southern side, where several species 

 of Jungermannia shelter ; but it must be observed that excepting in this place, and in 

 " The Gullet" (as it is termed) of the Holly -bush Hill, almost all the other Malvern 

 rocks are without exception dry and bleached by the wind and sun. At the Western 

 base of the Worcestershire Beacon occurs one of the few bogs that yet remain about 

 the hills, Aspidium Oreopteris marking this and the other boggy places by the profu- 

 sion in which it covers the margin of the black soil. A mile farther south, at " the 

 Wych," the syenite and limestone are in contact, and the latter having been exten- 

 sively quarried, numerous abandoned excavations occur, in many instances embowered 

 in wood, and offering favourite habitats for many mosses unable to fruit on the sun- 

 burnt sides of the hills. These limestone rocks also offer an instructive example of 

 the lichens more particularly affecting limestone, when compared with the loftier and 

 more exposed syenite. 



From the Worcestershire Beacon undulating green knolls, many cultivated to near 

 the summit, stretch past the Wells for a distance of four miles to the Herefordshire 

 Beacon, without any intervening valley ; but diversified in some places by rocky dry 

 ravines, strewed with broken fragments, and in others by plantations, or natural thick- 

 ets of stunted whitethorn along their sides. Round tufts of Ulex nanus dot the hills 

 in every direction. The portion of the chain just mentioned terminates rather ab- 

 ruptly at " the Wind's Point," where a deep valley commences, plunging down to the 

 eastern base of the Herefordshire Beacon, and extending to the romantic wooded vi- 

 cinity of Little Malvern Priory, where some thick alder-holts shroud a purling stream. 



The Herefordshire Beacon, with several detached eastern buttresses, lifts up its 

 bare, shivering and indented fortified sides in sullen grandeur, turf and mosses alone 

 occupying its windy ramparts, except a number of scathed, old, scattered elder-trees. 



