ABIES CEPHALONICA. 499 



The Abies described above grows spontaneously on all the higher 

 mountains of Greece from Thessaly southwards to Lagonia in the 

 Peloponnesus, at elevations ranging from 2,500 to 5,000 feet, either 

 forming pure forests or mixed with Pinus Laricio, P. Pinaster and 

 F(t(jn.s sylvatica ; it also occurs on Mount Enos in Cephalonica, and 

 to this insular locality it owes its present name. Its botanical 

 history may be thus briefly sketched : 



The presence of this Fir in Greece has been known from remote 

 antiquity as it is unquestionably the 'EXar?/ // apprjv of Theophrastus. 

 By the older botanists of modern times it was believed to be the 

 common Silver Fir Abies pectinata. In 1824, at the request of Mr. 

 Henry H. Long of Hampton Lodge, near Farnham, who was desirous of 

 knowing the species of Pine described by ancient writers under the 

 names of TTEVKY] and eXarr), General Charles James Xapier, at that time 

 Governor of Cephalonica, sent a packet of seeds of the Fir growing on 

 Mount Enos to the care of his sister Lady Eunbury. The packet was 

 duly forwarded to Hampton Lodge, but some seeds having dropped 

 from it, Lady Bunbury gave these to Mr. Charles Hoare of Luscombe.* 

 The seedlings raised both at Hampton Lodge and Luscombe were 

 found some years later to differ considerably from the common Silver 

 Fir, and they were named Abies cephalonica by London who first 

 published the species. In 1838 Professor Link, of Berlin, made the 

 ascent of Mount Parnassus which lie found covered towards the summit 

 on all sides with a forest of Firs of which he gathered herbarium 

 specimens, cones and seeds. The seeds germinated in the Berlin 

 Botanic Garden, and finding that the plants differed from Abies pedinata 

 he described the Mount Parnassus Fir in " Linnaea " as a new species 

 under the name of A. Apollinis. Endlicher took up this name for 

 the same tree, but reduced it to a variety of A. pedinata as Parlatore 

 did twenty years later with the A. cephalonica of London. About the 

 year 1856 Herr Schmidt, Director of the Royal Gardens at Athens, 

 during a botanical excursion in the Peloponnesus, detected an Abies in 

 Arcadia which Professor Heldreich described in Hegel's " Gartenflora " 

 for 1860 as a new species under the name of A. Regime Amalite, in 

 compliment to the former Queen of Greece who was a liberal patroness 

 of horticulture; and in 1861, in an article on the Firs of Greece 

 in the same publication, Professor Heldreich adopts as species A. cepha- 

 lonica, A. Apollinis and A. Reyince Amaliw, and adds to these a fourth 

 which lie calls A. panachaica ; plants under all these names were 

 subsequently distributed from German nurseries. Whatever morphological 

 differences may be detected in trees growing in different localities 

 in Greece, the perfect identity in the shape and structure of 

 the staminate flowers and cones of all of them indicate but too surely 

 that they cannot be specifically separated. In British gardens only 

 two forms are found differing from each other sufficiently to require 

 separate notice the insular form here recognised as the type, and the 

 continental form reduced to a variety of it as Apollinis. f 



* London, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, Vol. IV. p. 2328. 



t Both Willkomni and Beissner accept Regince Amalice as a variety distinct from 

 Apollinis on the ground that the stem is more slender, the leaves shorter and not so stiff, 

 and the cones smaller. 



