

1859] Discovery of Lepigonum rupicola. 105 



mens, he made them out clearly identical. It is very 

 questionable, at the same time, whether the trip to the 

 Channel Islands had any connexion with the matter; for 

 the Spergularia rupestris, or Lepigonum rupicola (Rock 

 Sandwort), does not seem to have been among the plants 

 he gathered there. It was at the meeting of the Thirsk 

 Botanical Exchange Club, held on January i5th, 1860, that 

 the discovery of this now well-known sand wort in the Isle 

 of Wight was announced, in the Report of the Curator, 

 Mr. J. G. Baker. 



The addition of this species to the British Flora was 

 after all only the minor half of his work at the "Lepigo- 

 num" group, of which, till that period, all our native forms 

 were commonly referred to the two species, rubrum and 

 marinum. A short paper, showing the occurrence of four 

 distinct indigenous species, resulted from the careful 

 examination on which he now entered, and the merits of 

 this article are shown by the acknowledgments made to it 

 in Mr. Syme's edition of "English Botany": which also 

 quotes his descriptions (in Thirsk Report, 1861) of the 

 Violas, reichenbachiana and riviniana. 



It ought to be added that the thoroughness with \vhich he 

 worked out this little group was in great measure due to the 

 liberal help of his Cambridge friends, Professor Babington 

 and Mr. Newbould, but for whom some of the best Con- 

 tinental descriptions would not have been accessible to 

 him. For instance, Mr. Babington had what was probably 

 the only copy in England (sent him by the Scandinavian 

 botanist, Fries), of Kindberg's " Symbolae ad Synopsin 

 Generis Lepigonorum," with the aid of which he had 

 himself contemplated setting to disentangle the British 

 species ; by his consent, Mr. Newbould copied out all that 

 he believed could be useful from this source of informa- 

 tion, and placed the results at the disposal of Mr. More. 

 Mr. Newbould would never, if he could help it, admit the 

 value of his own assistance, and protested against all 

 acknowledgments either in correspondence or print. " I 

 am very much amused," he writes (Dec. i5th, 1859), "at 

 your thinking I can enlighten you on the subject of 

 Lepigonum, when it is quite plain that your opinion on the 



