82 BRITISH SPECIES OF UTRICULARIA 



■the same ground in District II. But the notes regarding U. 

 vulgaris in that district are of a date when U. negleda had not 

 been well discriminated, at least for the county ; and, after 

 investigation, I am of opinion that all the so-called U. vuhjaris 

 given for District II. is the other species. The fact that all the 

 plants sent to Darwin as U. vulgaris, to aid his investigation of 

 Insectivorous Plants, and collected from Sopley and Bisterne in 

 District II., Avere found to be U. negleda, is evidence of such 

 confusion having taken place. 



It is my object in this paper to give some account of each of the 

 four species, and to include a description of each. This Avill not 

 be altogether a work of supererogation ; for one of them, U. 

 intermedia, Hayne, is very rarely seen in flower ; so rarely that 

 many excellent Herbaria which possess sheet upon sheet of its 

 foliage have been utterly devoid of a flower-spike hitherto, and 

 Boswell Syme, when he wrote the part of English Botany con- 

 taining this genus, had never seen a flowering British specimen. 

 (Syme, E.B., vol. vii., p. 129.) It is probable that the prolonged 

 drought and accumulated heat of the spring and summer of 1893 

 had for one of its many curious results the efi'ect of generating the 

 flower of U. intermedia. In both June and August I saw it 

 flowering freely in two localities in this county ; and I have thus 

 had the good fortune to observe all four Bladderworts in flower, 

 within a short period of time. 



Before taking the species seriatim I will recapitulate what has 

 been observed in recent times about the bladders which give the 

 name to the plants. Up to about the year 1875 the bladders, 

 which are attached to the leaves in some species, to barren branches 

 in another, were generally supposed to exist for the purpose of 

 raising the plant to the surface of the water for the flowering 

 period, by the air they were supposed to contain. In Syme's 

 English Botany (ed. 3., vol. vii., p. 126), I read: "The name of 

 this genus of plants is derived from the Latin word Uter, and 

 signifies a little bottle, or bladder-, or vesicle, referring to the 

 appendages of this sort on the stem and leaves of the species, 



