= 
Lees: The Three Graces. 335. 
vraisemblance carrying a kind of conviction with it, somewhat 
after the nature-studied method of the late Lord Tennyson. He 
saw, we would repeat, so clearly how one thing in this world 
hangs on some other thing, how nothing really stands absolutely 
alone. The late Archer-Briggs’ Flora of Plymouth is the only 
work that can compare with it in this conjunction of qualities. 
The dominant note is a fearless, unbiassed accuracy, and it is 
Struck in the very first Peengreyss — dealing with the 
Clematis, Traveller's Joy, we read: s garden origin with us 
(in Cheshire) is always obvious. A ool test species of Mr. 
Watson’s infer-agrarian zone, ies initial absence from our county 
praiseworthy i is the restraint shown; never an attempt to strain 
a point in favour of a claim to indigenity, or inclusion, so that 
the words ‘without comment,’ often appended to pre-existent 
records, acquire a peculiar force. 
An enthusiast (as the writer admits, while claiming to be 
something judicial also) might expatiate over many pages on 
the vividity and convincing character of the botanical picture 
wrought in with many strokes of true genius, coupled—rarest 
conjuncture of all—with a sure flair for the most striking way of 
throwing the light on the fact. 
As a letter writer, Lord De Tabley was, in a way, inimitable. 
He called field-collectors of Rubi ‘bramblers,’ suspecting a 
dying-out, seemingly degraded form of the raspberry, Rubus 
Leestt, to be the original and primordial Zypus—the opinion of a 
young Swedish rubologist, Areschoug—and added as his version 
of the Latin tag, ‘Life is short and brambles interminable. 
- One or two evidences we have that the Flora is not quite up 
to date; and these incompletions point the time when ill-health 
and increasing responsibilities made the hand loose its hold on 
the reins of detail, held up to then in so sure a grip. Certain 
points with regard to suggestive varieties, with a significant 
distribution, appear to have been neglected. Those widely 
diverging forms of the Spurrey (sa¢iva and vulgaris) in which 
we have, as it were, Evolution ‘caught in the act,’ though both 
in evidence in Chester fields, lack the elucidation one looked for 
at such hands. : 
s for Changes, as one would expect from the proximity of 
Birkenhead, chemic Runcorn, and octopoid hives of industry, 
‘Ichabod’ is the epitaph with regard to many dozens of species 
November 1899. 
