75. AMARYLLIDACEiE. 447 



1074. Galanthus nivalis, Linn. 



Area (1 5 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15). 



Alien .? Some difference of opinion exists respecting 

 the propriety of considering this plant native or introduced. 

 Babington describes it in his Manual as an undisputed 

 native. Henslow marks it as " possibly introduced by the 

 agency of man." Hooker marks it as having been " natu- 

 ralized through the agency of man." I have myself never 

 seen it in any locality which was not decidedly suspicious, 

 and to be distrusted in the case of a plant which has been 

 so long and so generally in cultivation, and is so persistent 

 in places where it is once planted. Most writers who 

 mention localities for it, do so with expressions of distnist. 

 But there are some exceptions to this latter view, of which 

 it may not be deemed too tedious to cite examples. Mr. 

 Edwin Lees (a man of naturally superior ability, although 

 undertaking too many subjects of study for strict accuracy 

 in any of them) says of the snowdrop, that "it certainly 

 occupies the virgin turf in a glen at the base of the Here- 

 fordshire Beacon, near Little Malvern : it is, however, 

 possible it might have been planted by the monks of Lit- 

 tle Malvern Priory." And in his recent publication on 

 ' The Botany of the Malvern Hills,' he advocates the na- 

 tivity of the plant more unconditionally. The late Mr. J. 

 E. Bowman wrote, with reference to the snowdrop in the 

 county of Denbigh, " we have it in abundance in meadows 

 and near streams, near Wrexham, where it is much more 

 likely to be indigenous than to have been introduced." 

 Mr. Roberts Leyland finds the Galanthus in " Cromwell 

 Bottom Wood, two miles from Halifax, in the greatest pro- 

 fusion, where it has grown time immemorial." Fries does 



