379 



THE COLONIST- ALIEN HERON-BILLS 

 OF YORKSHIRE. 



F. ARNOLD LEES, M.R.C.S. Eng., etc. 



The contrastive word-pictures, and sub-specific differentiations 

 that follow, may be a help, and so have a more than merely 

 temporary interest for West York herbarium factors ; until 

 that much needed revision of our waste-land Erodiums, 

 understood to be in the hands of Mr. Edmund G. Baker, is 

 forthcoming. Compiled from many book sources in collation 

 with the growing plants, while arranging my own gatherings 

 of the last ten years from the grey, limy fimites, i.e., fleece 

 scour and hide scrapings dumped in the curtilages of our 

 felmongeries and tanneries, to be later spread as a valuable 

 manure over both arable and pasture land, they represent the 

 growths of such wide-apart areas as the Argentine, Africa 

 (South), Egypt, the near East of Persian territory, with — and 

 perhaps mainly, though not so exclusively as formerly — 

 Australasia. Constantly re-inforced as wool-caught seeds, out- 

 cast with the scourings, they, with Brassica elongata, Malva 

 crispa and verticil! at a, Datura Tatula, Medick- and Xanthium- 

 burrs in variety, with a host of strange-faced Docks, " Fat- 

 heans " (Chenopods) twist-awn'd grasses like Polypogon and 

 Deyeuxia and at least three sorts of Amaranthus, not only 

 come up on the undistributed waste-heaps the first year of 

 depositing, but cradled and hot-bedded thus accidently, in 

 rich warm nitrogenous matrix, when the manure is dispersed 

 over the tilth to germinate, flower, and ripen seed — not all of 

 them, but many, the Malvas, Medicagos, and Erodiums es- 

 pecially — in a word, acclimatise and colonise ; take their 

 annual place as reinforcements of weed recruits in our crops. 

 Our annual mean temperature, or our summer heat is not 

 high and prolonged enough for many tropical peregrines of 

 course ; but the very curious ' Storks'-bills ' are much in 

 evidence, with their beaked fruits drying, through spiral 

 shrinkage, until they give us a marvellous simulacrum of the 

 Scythe of old Time fixed upon the Harry Lauder walking-stick 

 of modernity ! When dead and dry on the herbarium sheet, 

 a touch of the warm moist finger and they make a move ! 

 even then, as if about to come alive again ; no doubt, if planted 

 under a bell glass many of them would, at almost any time. 



For the following diagnoses I do not claim absolute identity 

 to the plant of the author first describing them. I mean that 

 I refer them to the group of growths under the name I give, 

 for some are normally biennial where they occur natively, while 

 only annual under the particular conditions they thrive in, 

 here. And, probably also, one of the growths — the ' Musky 



1917 Dec. 1. 



