FLORA OF HALIFAX 2438 
requirements of species as individual aggregates. Are we for ever 
be content with the dry dusty facts of the past? Who really 
at a 1 
treat @ Species as common as Anthriscus sylvestris. It is one of 
several species which, to the environment student, serves as a test 
on many soils. It is a shade species, found on hedge- banks, ditch- 
sides, open woods, and scattered more or less over meadows, but is 
never found in pastures properly stocked with i and sheep. The 
hedge on 4 meadow side of a fence may be perfectly white with it 
in the first week in June, while in the well-sheltered gS not a 
single maine can be found, even at the hedge-roo For the 
student of environment nothing is simpler, if he re his plants 
thoroughly, than to tell something of the past history of a grass- 
field, or of woodland or of m A farm-foreman was once lost in 
admiration at the comments ery a botavist in mid-winter, when the 
fields were empty, on the late stocking of pasture and meadow The 
student, discovering the position of affairs, and fully enjoying the 
ssing a 
mystery he Ae causing, on pa arm where not a pig was 
showing, r ** What a lot of Pigs your Bpebbeur runs here 
in be paadock! u ce ny out of his usual reti pene, the rustic 
exe. ‘ 
ang it, 
before, that this is ‘his biggest pig-grower in the county?’ ‘Do 
you see those bunches of grass three feet high? It is called cocks- 
foot,” replied the botanist; ‘‘pigs never touch it except as a 
medicine ; it gives them diarrhoea if they do. Where they halen 
nothing else, it grows up like that, and tells a tale anyone may 
read.” ‘Aye, I’ve seen it all my life, and never thought on it,’’ 
was the truthful reply. 
h facts lie all round us; they only want noting. One 
e spring: pond” supplied by the ‘chalk or limestone, too deep for 
ordinary plant-life, is accumulating a bed of shell-marl, to be a 
geological puzzle like that of Sedge Fen , Huntingdonshire, lying, 
as they frequently do, in the midst of peat- “bogs. The flora consists 
of one plant only—Chara hispida. It is capable of living at a depth 
of “si feet, and of subtracting lime from the highly charged water, 
while the shallower ponds, which have the very same origin, on the 
chalky boulder-clay near at hand, have the ordinary shallow still- 
water flora of the wv icehourioot tl assortment which is perfectly 
natural according to the configuration, depth, and water flow. The 
