The Heron- Bills of Yorkshire. 385 



Numidian, and puts it as a tender ' stove ' annual, caulescent, 

 diffuse, six inches high, purple petalled, and leaf segments with 

 linear lobes. Con-varietal with the last, or one of the other 

 hairy evolutions, but Loudon's reference is to Cavanillies 

 Disserts, vol. 5 t. 126 (1803). 



F. pimpin el Ice folium Sibthorp, 497b., Oxf. List. — The form 

 in which two of the petals have a deeper coloured spot at their 

 base. Our W. York fimites show this occasionally, but I am 

 unable to correlate the stigmation with any other constant 

 character unless it be an arrest in the expansion, and so the 

 size of the petals, but I never saw it in the cheer ophyllum — well 

 developed ? — growths. 



F. micranthum Beck, 49yd. — Sounds small-flowered — an 

 exhaustion of energy, from poor matrix plus untimely climatic 

 pinch ? But I do not know it on the ' field ' I have worked. 



Many growths would answer well to the pilosum Lej. and 

 Court, and more still to the pallidiflorum Jordan, the vars. 

 c. and f. of Druce's Oxford List, but their titles do not convince 

 me that they can be much more than states, but F. glandulosum 

 Bosch, No. 497g. of his list would seem to rank differently 

 if the production of glands implies more than temperatural 

 energy. Druce defines it in Hayward's Bot. Pkt. Book, 46-7 — 

 a most useful ' lug-about ' — as small, three to twelve inches, 

 biennial (lasting through a winter) and densely glanular In 

 our W. York, ambits, where the conditions vary little, one 

 season merely a week or two earlier or later than than preceding, 

 this glandose form grows ecadically among the others not rare 

 but accidental. 



E. romanum Willd., 495 Oxf. List ; 9443, Loudon. — Differs 

 from the last in that the leaves are all radical, as is the common 

 peduncle of the inflorescence. Flowers larger, petals purple, 

 equal sized. C. Bicknell says ' perennial.' Normally about 

 half-a-foot, nearly stemless, leaves pinnate with ovate pinnatifid 

 lobes ; Loudon gives a variety ' caucali folium Sweet ' as merely 

 ' of larger size,' and abroad I have seen it producing a more or 

 less leafed branching stem from ' fed-up ' robustious crowns, as 

 occasionally Cnicus arvensis, the stemless thistle, or Primula 

 vulgaris do, from either pollen-smirch or just excess of energy. 

 These sports are not worthy of the title variety, me judicc, as 

 they don't repeat from self-sown seed. I think, too, that a 

 good deal of cross-fertilisation takes place where two or more 

 sorts of this genus grow together in the artificial conditions of 

 a mobilised industrial supply. 



There remain to be considered only two subalpine Mediter- 

 ranean forms, now and then seen in rock-gardens, and in 

 delph-tips where rubbish has been dumped. 



[E. petrceum Willd. (Correvon), 9436, Loudon. — Small 

 Rock H.-bill ; E. Pyrenees, eastwards. Stemless, root-stock 



1917 Dec. 1. 



2B 



