176 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
¥. J. Hanbury apparently accepts it* without any hesitation as 
undoubtedly indigenous, and this without taking into account its 
recorded occurrence in Sussex, for he gives its index-number as 
1 (referring, doubtless, to Essex). 
Looking impartially into the probabilities and improbabilities 
of the case, one finds it difficult t ee with those who have 
ed 
It is true that the plant has now been recorded, on reasonably 
good authority, as growing apparently wild in three English 
counties (Essex, Suffolk, and Sussex), while an old (and question- 
ty (Li 
colnshire). Yet this counts for little in view of the fact that the 
plant is one which is very likely to have been, and to be, intro- 
duced into this country, either by design or accident, or both. Its 
crimson flowers are handsome enough to render it of interest to 
the gardener, and its edible tubers are sufficiently palatable for it 
to have been cultivated specially for them, as appears to have 
been done on Canvey Island. “Moreover, as the plant grows 
readily among standing crops of grain, its seeds might very easily 
be imported, quite by accident, among seed-corn. Nor would the 
plant have far to travel; for it is common in ce lland, 
and Germany, and is widely distributed over the Continent of 
Europe. In any case, it is impossible to doubt that the plants 
found growing near Wandsworth, Plymouth, and Darlington, and 
around the docks at Cardiff and King’s Lynn, had been imported by 
shipping, Shore! with ballast. Moreover, the fact that two other 
recorded British localities for the species (namely Canvey Island 
and Eastbourne) are also by the sea is not without significance in 
this connection. The other two recorded British localities for the 
plant (namely Fyfield and Woolpit) are, it is true, inland—some 
thirty and thirty-five miles respectively from the sea; but both 
are In corn-growing districts, to which seeds of the plant might 
t must be remembered, moreover, that, owing to the 
number of tubers, deeply buried in the ground, which the plant 
b 
from any locality where it had ever become established, whether 
naturally or by introduction 
Yet, though the plant appears to be an alien in this country, 
* London Catalogue, 10th ed. (1908). 
t+ The Suffolk locality, mentioned above, was not recorded when Mr. Han- 
bury wrote. 
