384 The Heron- Bills of Yorkshire. 



ground-ivy or speedwell, by our field banks and hawthorn 

 hedgesides. About Leeds, Yellow beadstraw and Convolvulus 

 arvensis have almost vanished — trampled out of existence by 

 the footpadding of the oi polloi ; and I know many a roadside 

 bank on the Roman ' rigg ' of Allwoodly and Moortown, gay 

 when I was a lad, more than half a century ago, with such 

 common offertories of nature as Viola Riviniana and Fragar- 

 iastrum, sterile and non-posyworth as they might be, along 

 which, five miles in ' the country ' outside Borough boundaries, 

 hardly a single tuft could be found in the height of next year's 

 printemps ! So it is I conclude — reverting to the ' occurrence ' 

 of the ' muscovy ' geranium in Craven 250 years ago — that as 

 all plants were ' First-foots ' once, ' in a Beginning ' as Genesis 

 has it — on the thresholds of earth in our land, where men from 

 Turner's day found and made record of them, at best E. 

 moschatum must rank as one of those many colonists that have 

 not under the conditions ' made good,' because either the 

 initial material was too scanty, or reinforcements to sustain 

 the effort too irregular. It needs quantity and a ' big push ' 

 often to make some colonists permanent incoles ; a century 

 didn't do it with the Roemeria poppy in Cambridgeshire 

 cornfields, and with cleaner and cleaner seed-corn the Hares'-ear 

 Grow-Through, once frequent has grown — rather not grown — 

 to be the rarest of ' Kecksies ' over our warm acres of mag- 

 nesium-limestone arable. 



[E. hymenodes Willd. 9447, Loudon ; 498, Oxf. List.— N. 

 African Mediterranean coasts from Barbary east to (?) Egypt. 

 A spithama (9 inches) in stature with petals pinky blue, shrubby 

 at base, a stove perennial, i.e., tender (Loudon), stem erect, 

 branching, leaves tri-lobed or five partite, very blunt, crenate, 

 stipules and bracts ovate, scarious. I do not know it on our 

 skin-yard fimits for certain, hot-bed like as they are under 

 summer sun for 3 months, during which a Datura Tatula with 

 livid blue stem a yard high, will form its prickly chestnut-burr 

 fruits ; but Dunn admits it as having occurred]. 



E. cicutarium L'Her. ' Hemlock ' lvd., Stork's-bill, 497, 

 Oxf. List. — Well-known in two forms as a native in sandy 

 soils both coastal and inland, all forms having bristle-tipt 

 sepals, with the filaments not toothing. Leaves pinnatisect 

 with linear sessile segmentation, pinnatifid, or even further 

 decompound like Conium or Anthriscus, the var. or form 

 chcerophyllum Cavan., possibly the type, commonest at any 

 rate among those of suspect sites which have been manured 

 from skin-waste. 



Forma chceophyllum Cav., 497 e., Oxf. List. — Hooker says 

 the pinnules are acute lobed, and petals twice as long as the 

 non-glandulose sepals which have appressed hairs. 



F. bipinnatum Willd., No. 9442b. Loudon, who says it is 



Naturalist, 



