89 

 A FLORAL FILM OF 1831. 



E. G. BAYFORD, F.E.S. 

 Annotated by F. A. Lees, M.R.C.S. 



This picture of the flora of the Brampton and Wath area as 

 set down in three hsts in the Village Magazine or Wath Reposi- 

 tory (of 1831) may add an item to the Bibhography of Yorkshire 

 Botany. The serial referred to was issued in the years 1831, 

 1832 and 1833, when it came to an untimely end. Its editors 

 were the Rev. Wm. Moorhouse and Larret Langley, of Brampton 

 Academy, near Rotherham. F. A. Lees duly listed the work 

 of Langley with that of the Rev. E. Wilson, of Swinton, in 

 Loudon's Mag. Nat. Hist., 1828 (Flo. W. Yks., 91), so this 

 transcript from the Wath repository of local Indigenous 

 Botany is supplementary thereto. 



Nothing has been altered in the record as here given, save 

 that in bringing the three papers into one list I have put the 

 items into their linear arrangement more or less, and corrected 

 obvious misprints such as ' Nitica ' into Urtica, etc. 



Not being a botanist I cannot pretend to pass any criticism 

 on the species named ; but I may be permitted to draw atten- 

 tion to the ' Green-man Orchis,' which, judging from the 

 remarks in Flora W. Yorks. (p. 423) — ' Hampole Wood,' by 

 ' a Mrs. Broadrick ' (sic) — appears to call for further investi- 

 gation. [Ay, and a clue, furnished in the place Brodsworth 

 being near Hampole, and the fact that Watson does not 

 seem to have seen a specimen. — F.A.L.]. Undoubtedly the 

 district, and as a consequence its flora and fauna have 

 materially altered in the eighty-odd years that have lapsed 

 since 1831. A coleopterist myself, I have spent many years 

 in studying the distribution in Yorkshire of our indigenous 

 beetles ; and in the Wath area, as also in the Barnsley district, 

 the gradual disappearance almost to extinction of the Glow- 

 worm is a remarkable and indisputable fact. Although I 

 have known both vicinities for over thirty years, I have never 

 seen it in either ! yet at one time it was common all over the 

 Wath area, Newhill, Brampton, etc. The late Henry Johnson 

 [chemist, of Barnsley, who worked with and for me botanically 

 in the Eighties. — F.A.L.j told me that the last specimen he 

 saw at large was on his father's grave in the churchyard of 

 Bolton-on-Dearne. The only place where it now survives is 

 on the rail-bank near Conisboro', and it is uncommon there. 

 Possibly similar or parallel reasons for this gradual dying-off 

 may account for the disappearance of the orchid. [Well, yes, 

 and of the dormouse, too, in many an even-still-sheltered 

 site upon the warm magnesian limestone. — F.A.L.] unless, 

 of course, a mistake in identification was made : whether this 

 is possible or probable I do not know. [I cannot say decidedly 



1918 Mar. 1. 



