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SOME BOTANICAL RECORDS. 

 By Fred. Hamilton Davey. 



At the last Annual Meeting of this Institution it fell to my 

 lot to furnish a brief account of one of the greatest botanical 

 surprises of the year — the discovery of Nitella hyalina in that 

 happy hunting-ground of the botanist, the Loe Pool, near 

 Helston. To-day there is nothing of such absorbing interest to 

 chronicle, but a summer's hard work at the botany of mid and 

 west Cornwall enables me to lay before you several interesting 

 items. 



Next in point of value to the discovery of a species new to a 

 county, must be ranked the verification of a record about which 

 there has been some dubiety, and the adding of new stations for 

 the more uncommon plants. In the ninth edition of the 

 "London Catalogue," published as recently as 1895, Brassica 

 Cheiranthus is set down as occurring only in the Channel Islands. 

 The third edition of Sowerby's "English Botany," also limits 

 it to " the sandy seashore at St. Aubin's Bay, Jersey, and in 

 Alderney." In Hooker's "Students' Flora" it is mentioned 

 as having occurred in Cornwall, without any hint as to the 

 finder, the year, or the locality. When exploring the south 

 coast in the neighbourhood of St. Austell, on September 11th 

 last, it was my good fortune to find a group of about fifty 

 plants of this local and very rare species in various stages of 

 progress, but mostly in fruit, thereby enabling me to settle its 

 identity without the slightest doubt. Mr. E. V. Tellam has 

 also had another colony under observation for nearly thirty years 

 at a village a few miles distant. These records will, I think, be 

 regarded as valuable additions to our county's flora. 



In the course of my summer's work nothing struck me more 

 forcibly than what may not be inappropriately called the sectional 

 richness of our flora. Ever since the Exeter meeting of the 

 British Association, nearly thirty years ago, when the Lizard 

 Peninsula was marked on the botanical map as the " district of 

 Leguminosese," we have known that no other county can compare 



