226 LEES: NOTE ON A LOWLAND SAND-LOVING GENTIAN. 
circumstances. In this division, be it understood, our aggregate 
names ‘ campestris’ and Amarella disappear as specific cognomina ; 
‘campestris’ becoming in part da/fica (the annual lowland form), 
and in part germanica Murb. (which stands for the usual British 
plant); and in part swecica, this attenuate yet still biennial plant 
being as yet only known from the Shetland Isles, I believe. Then, 
the ‘Amarella’ type of plant, with five-partite calyx is divided into 
axillaris Murb. (the name standing for the ordinary British Amarella 
of the chalk and limestone), and /imgulata Agh. (=fpracox, Raf. 
1095b of Lond. Cat.), which is an early flowering form and, as one 
would expect, dwarfish with abbreviated internodes, hitherto not 
very certainly known away from the bare chalk downs of the South, 
although the early-flowering Pontefract and Carperby Amare/la will 
probably prove the same. This leaves only one other unaccounted 
for: the Annual w/iginosa of Willdenow, with a variably-cleft calyx ~ 
and corolla, not confined to limestone, rather preferring damp, stony, 
moory ground, and which occurs not only in Scotland but about 
Halifax in Yorkshire (Flo. W. Yorks., p. 326), having a distinct 
facies of its own suggestive of disease or growth under difficulties. 
I will not here express more than a passing doubt as to the right of 
Gentiana baltica to be considered a distinct species of equal value 
to the aggregate Linnzean types; yet it is a fact that many plants, 
like the turnip and the henbane, are both of annual and biennial 
duration, flowering the first year (late on as annuals which germinate 
in spring) and subsequent years ; and these forms differ in many less 
essential characters quite as much and as permanently from each 
other as Gentiana baltica does from G. campestris, or G. uliginosa 
and G. dingulata from G. Amarella. Further, the parallelism between 
the forms of the respective groups seems a circumstance suspiciously 
suggestive of the specific identity of each group; ie., that the 
biennial G. Amarella should have in G. uliginosa and perhaps 
lingulata (precox) forms homologous with the da/tica and perhaps 
suecica variants of G. campestris. It is, however, not easy for a visitor 
gathering the u/iginosa or suecica late in summer, in a high latitude 
on a sandy barren by the sea, to ascertain for certain whether or not 
it is there an annual, and dogmatise as to the impossibility of the 
same thing being usually biennial on a down in Dorset, Devon, of 
Cornwall. Herr Murbeck asserts that he has found them retain the 
characters he defines them by, under cultivation between 1888 and 
1892. As long ago as 1774 (see Smith’s ‘ Eng. Flora,’ vol. 2, P- 31) 
a dwarf variety of the then-considered annual G. Amarella ‘which 
had survived the winter’ was found on a heath between Grantham and 
Ancaster—the earliest record of /imgulata (precox) for Lincolnshire. 
Naturalist, 
