A LOWLAND SAND-LOVING GENTIAN. 
F, ARNOLD LEES, M.R.C.S. 
Gentiana baltica Murbeck (in ‘Acta Horti Bergiani,’ II, No. 3, 
Stockholm, 1892). This new item (No. 1098) in Lond. Cat. gth 
edn, (1895), in absence of any reference to a diagnosis, and being 
found neither in part 2 of ‘Index Kewensis’ nor in any Englished 
manual, is likely to prove a dead wall, if not a stone over which to 
stumble, to many of us. The average botanist does not ‘take’ the 
‘Journal of Botany,’ and the more thorough one who does will gather 
with slow surprise that plate 237 of ‘English Botany’ figuring the 
usual G. campestris of Britain (from a specimen gathered in 1792 
at Bury St. Edmunds) is quoted as the form answering to the 
Swedish splitter’s new appellation! The Journal referred to in its 
issue for January, 1894, in a paper by Mr. W. H, Beeby reviewing 
Herr Murbeck’s study of the Endotrichian group of Gentians in the 
‘Transactions of 1892 (see above), furnishes the key to this lock hardly 
pickable by the general: from that article most of what follows is 
compiled and correlated, solely with intent to assist Yorkshire 
observers in arranging and rightly referring what they may collect 
this harvest on our uplands and sea-banks. There are forms about 
Brimham, Pateley, Hornsea, Coatham Sand-hills, Malham, and 
Halifax, on sand as well as limestone, which, as much as any 
mandrake ever did, ‘cry aloud’ for expert recognition, 
Without going into the vexed question of the ‘species’ and 
‘sub-species,’ let alone ‘variety,’ ‘form,’ or ‘state,’ Herr Murbeck 
divides the ciliate-throated Gentians, with which we are concerned, 
into two groups, the annual and biennial, two titles, da/tica Murb. 
and x/iginosa Willd., being thrown under the unicycle; and four 
others, germanica Murb. (not the 1096 of Lond. Cat.), swecica Murb., 
axillaris Murb., and /ingulata Agh., under the new bicycle; for 
a reference to Hooker or Babington will show that hitherto the 
Linnean species G. Amarella and G. campestris—names yet kept up 
in the catalogue—have ranked as annuals, although, as with the 
Ribblehead Arenaria gothica, individuals have often been observed 
surviving the winter and completing their cycle the succeeding year. 
Suggestive and strange it is that the lowland sand forms should be 
the annual, and with us the high moor and crag-inhabiting ones the 
longer lived; when, as a general law, annuals under vicissitudes tend 
to have prolonged existences in the absence of inimical climatic 
e 
August 1895. 
