The Heron- Bills of Yorkshire. 383 



E. cygnorum Nees, in PL Preiss, i., 162. Not in Loudon's 

 Encyclo ; 499 Oxf. List.— Australia ; and (?) other parts of 

 the S. hemisphere — one sees it on the heaps of waste, off skins 

 from both the Argentine and the Cape. The source of the 

 pelts fleshed in any particular yard has more than once helped 

 me to a name ! F. Mueller's description, in Plants Victoriae.i. 

 172 (1862) — to which Mr. G. C. Druce has helped me — follows. 

 ' Annual or biennial, habit of the coarser forms of E. cicutarium, 

 sometimes slightly pubescent, sometimes hispid with the 

 hairs of the stem spreading or reflexed. Leaves deeply 3-lobed, 

 ■or divided to the base into 3 lobes or segments, usually obovate 

 or cuneate, and more or less deeply-toothed, or again 3-lobed, 

 the central lobe larger, broader, and more lobate than the 

 lateral ones. Flowers blue usually 2 to 5 in the umbel. Sepals 

 pointed. Petals obovate, scarcely exceeding the calyx, or 

 shorter. Filaments of the anthers broad at the base with subulate 

 points ; staminodia scale-like, often toothed. [In examining the 

 flowers of these Erodia with the lens, the distinction of which 

 is ciliate or subulated, and which toothed must, clearly, be 

 carefully ascertained, for in E. moschatum Hooker says the 

 perfect, ' anther-bearing filaments are toothed at the base.'] 

 Capsule lobes glabrous, or hairy, or hispid. Beak usually 

 above 2 inches in length.' Three ! not infrequently, and 

 relatively to others, truly Swans'-billed ! Recognised in 

 Yorkshire by Dr. B. Carrington as long ago as 1861, about 

 Guiseley and Yeadon Mills, and near Huddersfield in 1858, 

 but in that case recorded as giant ' moschatum ' ; which leads 

 us ' back to our muttons ' (fleece borne, imported, if unim- 

 portant, vegetal waifs and strays). That E. moschatum was 

 looked on as a Foreigner (by some) is shown, I think, by its 

 earlier name of the Muscovy Herons'-bill. The garden-grown 

 musk-geranium was known to Ray in 1670 (Cat. 132), and not 

 only for ' near Bristow ' but for the limestone stone-wall 

 country of Craven in Yorkshire, where it was probably entitled 

 even more justly to the rank of an intruder from foreign 

 parts, brought in some way with raw material to the first 

 industrial works, as now with much multiplied frequency to 

 the latest. There is no specimen of the time extant I believe 

 to settle which the Cravener really was ; and even coming 

 down to the Hailstone period of 1792, 125 years back only, 

 there is no Craven specimen in the York Museum Herbarium, 

 the Catalogue of which, so ' truly and laboriously laid ' and 

 made for us by Mr. Hy. J. Wilkinson, present Honorary 

 Curator, lies before me, with its (in other cases) hundreds of 

 invaluable fixed data. And, indeed, the truly musk-scented 

 growth is, to-day, incole or casual, almost the rarest and 

 most exceptional of those compensational growths which, like 

 the Pineapple mayweed, are taking the place of an older flora, 



1917 Dec 1. 



