if education did her work, we should learn.in childhood 
from our mother and our nurse : it is their immense pro- 
fusion, not their rarity, that calls for notice ; and they re- 
esent but a small part of the hill flora. To exhaust this 
fairly we must visit four different regions—the hill tops, 
‘the bogs, the coppices, and the slopes toward the sea. Of 
the first it is difficult to speak without a rapturous digres- 
sion as their familiar sights and sounds occur to us—the 
breeze that seems half conscious of the joy it brings, the 
musical hum of bees, the warble of invisible larks, the 
popping of the dry furze pods in the stillness, the quivering 
air above the heather, the startled spiders with their 
appended egg-bags, the grasshoppers, the green hair 
streaks, the gem-like tigerbeetles on the wing, in the 
distance the Mendips and the yellow sea, or the long rich 
valley, closed by Dunkery and Minehead. 
Heath, furze, bracken, and whortle berries, are the four 
_ tetrarchs of the hill tops, giving endless shades of red, and 
green, and yellow. The heaths are three, and only three 
—the heather, the cross-leaved heath, and the bottle heath, 
the last exhibiting rarely a white variety, which in the 
language of flowers tells the tenderest of tales. From 
beneath their shelter peep the eyebright, the spring 
potentil, the heath bedstraw, and the creeping St. John’s- 
_ wort; amidst them springs the uncommon bristly bent 
Tass ; everywhere the green paths which wind amongst 
_ them are carpeted with the mcenchia and the little break- 
_ stone, and bordered by the red and yellow sheep’s sorrel 
and the pale yellow mouse-ear, On many of the prickly 
furze beds grows the wiry leafless dodder ; every ditch is 
_ filled with masses of lemon-scented oreopteris, and every 
patch of stones is hidden by the pink blossoms of the 
‘mountain stone crop. At 800 feet above the sea we meet 
with mat grass and the cross-leaved heath. Higher still 
_ we find the slender deers’ hair, first cousin to the isolepis 
_ of our greenhouses ; and highest of all grow, for those who 
_ know their haunt, two species of the stag’s horn club moss. 
_ The bogs are very numerous. They form the summits 
_of the combes ; and some of them descend the hill until 
they join a deep cut stream. All are covered with the 
turquoise bloom of the forget-me-not and the glossy pel- 
_ tate leaves of the marsh pennywort, and choked with the 
little water Blinks. They all include liverwort with its 
umbrella-shaped fructification, sphagnum, marshwort, and 
-pearlwort ; and on their margins grow the ivy-leaved hair 
bell, the lesser spearwort, the lousewort, and the bog 
_ pimpernel. In a few of them are found the oblong pond- 
weed and the marsh St. John’s-wort ; in twocombes only, 
_ as far as I know, grows, alone of its genus, the round- 
seaved sundew. 
Of the coppices Cockercombe and Seven Wells are the 
_ best known ; but their large trees check the growth of 
flowers ; and the botanist will find more to please to him 
‘in Butterfly Combe and Holford Glen, which are smaller 
and less frequented, Here in early spring masses of the 
_ white wild hyacinth rise amid last year’s dead leaves; here 
‘grow the cowwheat, woodrush, golden rod, sheeps’ scabious, 
wood pimpernel, wild raspberry, sanicle, and twayblade. 
The helleborine is found in Crowcombe ; in Tetton woods 
the rare pink lily of the valley ; in Cothelstone the adders’ 
tongue and mountain speedwell ; in Ashleigh Combe, 
_ thelypteris ; in Aisholt wood the white foxglove, white 
herb Robert, and white prunella ; while under the famous 
_hollies of Alfoxden, sacred to the memory of “ Peter Bell” 
_ and “We are Seven,” grow the graceful millet grass and 
_ a rare variety of the bramble. 
On the St. Audries slope the changed soil and the influ- 
ence of the sea give birth to several new plants. The 
autumn gentian, the tufted centaury, the round-headed 
f oa and the sea starwort are abundant near the cliffs ; 
“the perfoliate yellow wort is common; fluellen grows in 
_ the stubbles, the lady’s tresses near the lime-kiln, the sea 
_ pimpernell between the stones, the arrow-grass and hard- 
grass just above the sea, to which we descend between 
VATURE 
banks covered, as no other banks are covered, by the mag- 
nificent large flowered tutsan. 
A few rare plants remain, which come under neither of 
the groups described. The Cornish money-wort abounds 
in a small nameless combe near Quantockshead ; the rare 
white stonecrop is indigenous or naturalised at Over 
Stowey ; the white climbing corydalis is found close to 
Mr, Esdaile’s lodge ; the lady’s mantle, goldilocks, and 
bistort grow in the Aisholt meadows; the stinking 
groundsel hard by the remains of Coleridge’s holly-bower. 
In the same neighbourhood I have twice found the purple 
broomrape ; and Wilson’s filmy-fern, one of the rarest of 
British ferns, is established in the Poet’s Glen. 
I venture to hope that there is no one present to whom 
this catalogue of plants is a catalogue and nothing more. 
Our English wildflowers are so charming in themselves, 
they awake in all of us so many associations, they 
hold so large a place in our poetical literature, their 
popular names reveal so many an etymological secret and 
recall so many a striking superstition, that almost every 
one, whatever be the line of his mental culture, is willing 
to own their interest and to linger over their recital. To 
the Shakspearian scholar they bring memories of Perdita 
at the shearing-feast, of Ophelia in her madness, of Imogen 
sung to her untimely grave, of the grey discrowned head 
of Lear, with its chaplet of “rank fumiters and furrow- 
weeds.” The lover of Milton points to the “rathe prim- 
rose,” the eye-purging euphrasy, and the amaranth, which 
was twined in the crowns of worshipping archangels. The 
historian of the long-buried past sees in the Cornish money- 
wort, the filmy-fern, and the Lusitanian butterwort of our 
hills evidence distinct and graphic of the time when Scot- 
land, Ireland, and Spain formed with our own peninsula 
portions of a single continent. The student of folk-lore 
tells his tales of the ceremonies which surrounded the ver- 
vain, the St. John’s-wort, and the rowan, and of the strange 
beliefs which clung to the celandine, the hawkweed, and 
the fumitory. The etymologist will elevate the names 
familiar to us allinto records of the origin and habits of 
our remote forefathers ; he will disinter the fragments of 
myth and history which lie embalmed in the centaury, the 
peony, the carline thistle, the flower-de-luce, and the herb 
Robert ; he will tell us how the laburnum closes its petals 
nightly like a tired labourer, how the campion crowned 
the champions of the tournament, how the foxglove, the 
troll-flower, and the pixie-stool, bring messages from fairy 
land ; how the scabious, the lungwort, the scrophularia, 
and the wound-wort, bear witness to the grotesque beliefs of 
a pre-scientific medical community. Of the botanist I 
need not speak. Nota flower that blows but will furnish 
him with the text of an eloquent discourse. Forms that 
yield to other men artistic and sensuous enjoyment only, 
lay bare before him secrets of structure and of function as 
wonderful as those which characterise his own bodily 
frame ; suggesting each its truth of design, and natural 
selection, and adapted change, and mysterious organic 
force. In the fructification of the orchid, the stamens of 
the barberry, the hairs of the nettle, the leaf of the sundew, 
he reads lessons as profound and similes as graceful, as 
were taught to Chaucer, and Southey, and Wordsworth, 
by the daisy, and the holly, and the lesser celandine. _ 
Year after year he greets the early spring with an enthu- 
siasm which his neighbours know not, as one by one his 
friends of many years, the snowdrop, and the violet, and 
the crimson hazel stigma, and the stitch-wort, and the 
daffodil, and the coltsfoot, come back to him like swallows 
from their winter sojourn out of sight. Year after year, as 
the seasons die away and the earth is once more bare, he 
looks back delighted on the pleasant months along which 
he has walked hand in hand with Nature ; for he feels that 
his intelligence has been strengthened, his temper sweet- 
ened, and his love of God increased, by fellowship with 
her changes, study of her secrets, and reverence for her 
works. } W. TUCKWELL 
. 
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