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on the other side of the road, is a low meadow, in which Cyperus lon- 

 gus may be found growing pretty plentifully, and flowering at the 

 close of August and throughout September, if spared by the scythe, 

 but it is neither so luxuriant nor so abundant as in another station 

 near Niton, at the back of the island. Passing through the farm-yard 

 at Apes down, a road conducts to Rowledge, at the upper end of the 

 valley, the sloping sides of which are clothed with thick woods inter- 

 rupted by bands or strips of down, whilst the centre is occupied by 

 corn-fields ; the soil is of a chalky nature, and full of loose angular 

 stones. In these woods, on the right or western side of the valley, 

 ascending from Apes down, the Calamintha may be found, growing 

 amongst the long herbage and under the shade of the bushes, in vast 

 quantity, for a great part of the way towards the head of the vale, 

 scattered over the hill-side copses wherever there is shade and shel- 

 ter sufficient, but, unlike our common species of Calamintha, always 

 avoiding open and exposed situations, or where there is not plenty of 

 herbage and undergrowth, in which respects it resembles Melittis Me- 

 lissophyllum, a plant which, though frequent immediately on crossing 

 the Solent to the main land of Hampshire, I have hitherto been una- 

 ble to detect in the Isle of Wight. 



Our Calamintha is a highly beautiful plant, with flowers of a fine 

 pale rose colour, spotted with purple or even blood-red : the corolla 

 is nearly an inch long, and three times the length of the calyx. Be- 

 sides the vastly larger size of the flowers and leaves, which last are of 

 a brighter green (pointed and much more closely and acutely serrated) 

 than in the usual form of C. officinalis ; the whole plant is taller, more 

 slender and much less branched : the stems are lax, ascending or reclin- 

 ing : the cymes (c^'mose verticils) fewer flowered ; the calyx coloured 

 (purple), the teeth of the upper lip strongly recurved : the lower lip of 

 the corolla is very broad, its lobes rounded, the middle one but little 

 exceeding the two lateral ones in length, and separated from them by 

 a very narrow and shallow emargination, hence appearing almost as 

 one undivided lobe. Calamintha officinalis is well known as a na- 

 tive of rocky and shady subalpine woods in Switzerland, Camiola, 

 and other parts of the South of Europe, and may well be found with 

 us at a less considerable elevation, being probably one of those plants 

 that, like Tamus communis, Briza minor, Gastridium lendigermn, and 

 other species common here, have a tendency to migrate in a north- 

 westerly direction towards their vanishing point.* No one who has 



* This is remarkably the case with the Irish Ericaceae — Arhutus Unedo, Erica 



3u 



