1868] Botany and Dredging. 201 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 



BOTANY AND DREDGING. 



[1868.] 



IN the spring he had a rather prolonged attack of ill- 

 health, and a visit to Killarney on sick-leave (May yth ta 

 1 8th) was not productive of much botany, though it 

 afforded him his first sight (on May 8th) of the beautiful 

 Pinguicula grandiflora in flower. But as the summer 

 advanced he found time for a few short runs down the 

 east coast, and one of these resulted in a very unexpected 

 and pleasing addition to the Irish flora. 



In the year 1837 tne Rev. George Edwards Smith had 

 first discovered as a British plant Scirpus parvulus, a 

 minute club-rush about one inch high, which he found 

 growing on a Hampshire mud-flat. Since that date Mr. 

 Smith had again sought it, but without success; nor had 

 any other botanist, during the thirty years which had 

 elapsed since the day of its discovery, found a trace of the 

 species, there or elsewhere, in Britain. It had come to be 

 treated as extinct, or non-British, in all the principal 

 Floras, except Professor Babington's. But its re-discovery 

 was a favourite dream among Hampshire botanists, of 

 whom Dr. Bromfield had been especially diligent in his 

 search ; and Mr. More's interest in the long-fruitless 

 quest is shown by a passage in his " Natural History of 

 the Isle of Wight," where, speaking of the botany of the 

 Newtown marshes, he says (p. 67) : 



A careful search in the salt marshes of Newtown, and especially of 

 Yarmouth, will very probably prove the lost Scirpus parvulus a native 

 of the island as well as of the opposite coast. So inconspicuous a 

 plant is very likely to be overlooked among the rank vegetation and 

 sea-rushes, in whose company it is said to flourish. 



It may be remembered that his own last important 



