1863.] BOTANICAL NOTES, NOTICES, AND QUERIES. 445 



We hope to publish a review of the work on Alpine Plants which ac- 

 companied the letters. 



Petasites fragkans. — The following, from our excellent Plymouth 

 correspondent, has just arrived :— A few days ago I noticed Fdasites 

 fragrans in flower at Crabtree, where it was diliusing delicions odours. 

 The observation of Babington, that this plant is " quite naturalized in 

 some places in the south," is applicable to this neighbourhood. 1 know 

 more stations of it than of P. vulgaris, which is not common here. 



Our Buxton correspondent informs us that at Buxton " there is a man 

 who trades in botanical rarities, that is, he supplies the visitors with wild 

 flowers, and the consequence is what may be expected, viz. that the 

 rariores become 7'arisslm(E, and the latter, in process of time, disappear 

 like snow on the mountains in the months of July and August." 



This disappearance of rare plants is a local and chronic complaint, for 

 which there is no remedy. Patience is a useless appliance. Many years 

 ago we were informed of the destructive pro])ensities of flower-collectors 

 in Surrey, and requested not to patronize these wholesale rhizotoniids 

 (root-grubbers) : but — alas for sentimentality ! — poverty makes people ac- 

 quainted with strange bedfellows ; and cold and hunger, and the cravings 

 of small childer who cry for bread, extinguish the sentimentalities ! 



Our Sheffield correspondent is to be commended for keeping secret the 

 exact locality of Achillea decolornns. Are all who cannot plead poverty 

 as an excuse, innocent of taking from Nature's abundance more than they 

 really want, careless of the claims of posterity, unmindful of the disap- 

 pointment which their rapacious greed may cause to some future hunter 

 after rare plants? Let Mr. Stevens answer these questions. I have pur- 

 chased in his sale-rooms, among a moderately-sized bundle of plants, 

 above a hundred examples of one plant confined to the chalk of the south 

 of England. Hundreds of specimens of rare species were disposed of for 

 less than a shilling per hundi'cd. Only last season, May or June, 1862, 

 thousands of specimens of the rarest of British Perns, collected by a 

 gentleman (so said the catalogue), and his property, were sold at Mr. 

 Stevens's auction-rooms. 



Ehynchospora. 



I take the opportunity of mentioning an erratum in the little article 

 headed " Devon Plants," in the December number of the ' Phytologist ;' 

 the sentence, as it now stands, conveys a different meaning from what I 

 intended : — " On examining my specimens of RhyncJiospora, I was struck 

 with the peculiar way in which this plant perpetuates itself," etc. It 

 should be : " On examining my specimens of RhyncJiospora I was struck 

 with the peculiar way in which this plant perpetuates itself, and increases 

 by forming almost semibnlbous shoots within the sheaths at the base of 

 the stalk, which shoots, when quite rootless, a touch is in some cases suf- 

 ficient to detach from the parent stem." T. R. Archer Briggs. 



Wiltshire Plants. 



It would seem as if Carex clundeslina (Jimnilis) had eloped from Salis- 

 bury Plain in a clandestine manner, for I explored very carefully ten mdes 

 of the road between Stonchengc and Heytesbury, frequently with my eyes 



