30 . THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, de. 
Ar the meeting of the Linnean Society on 5th December, Dr. 
Stapf exhibited a series of specimens of Spartina Townsendi 
representing different stages of development and tall and dwarf 
rms, and for comparison also typical yeh seo = S alterniflora, 
S. stricta, and on behalf of Messrs. H. & J. Groves, S. Neyrautit 
in many respects an intermediate peaitins pebeisaid S. sneraitone 
and S. stricta, although it is different enough to be treated as 
specifically distinct from either. He then described the gene 
tion of the three species, and more particularly that of S. Tow 
send, which was first collected near Hythe in 1870 and distributed 
as S. alterniflora. Three years later the brothers Groves foun 
it again in the same locality, and in 1881 they recognized it as a 
distinct new species and named it S. Townsendi. At present it 
covers many hundreds or, may be, thousands of acres on the 
ha, se —— with extermination in some places. There 
are three theories to explain the appearance of the grass, which is 
bs i gis have been long overlooked :—(1) It may have 
been introduced, like S. alterniflora, which is a common mud- 
grass on the Atlantic coast of America from Newfoundland to 
Brazil; Lord Montagu has, in fact, stated that the people on. the 
: n the 
Se: mentioned by Arechavaleta and Stuckert, are distinctly 
different. (2) It may have originally arisen as a mutation of 
S. sivieton and, the characters having become fixed, the progeny 
ehaves like ordinary species. hance this may be 
that there is no evidence, historical or morphological, for 
this assumption. (3) It sprang = a fertile hybrid or hybrids 
between S. alterniflora and S. stricta, and has assumed the char- 
acter of a ssekicaleals vigorous sak: fairly constant species. In 
favour of this theory two circumstances may be adduced : first, 
the fact that S. Townsend: combines actually not a few of the dis- 
— —— of both aise and secondly, that it has an 
almost exact parallel in S. Neyrauti, which ee nse as a 
hybrid rig te alterniflora and 8S. ta from s found 
gro ong the parents in the nhl of the secthe. This 
S. Neyrautii differs from S. Townsends we in the more wit 
nounced accentuation of the characters d m 8S. altern 
The Adour and the Bidassao Bivens on ne side and 
Southampton Water on the other are the only two places in 
the world, so far as we know, where S. alterniflora and S. stricta 
meet; and it would be a case of extraordinary coincidence if 
