3» 



by your own observation is worth 50 taken on trust from 

 books, or picked up by listening to a paper like this. I shall 

 be glad to supply you with names and localities of our mari- 

 time plants. 



Many, if not most, of these fleshy sea-side plants contain 

 iodine, and also large quantities of various salts of soda. 

 Some few of them, as Thrift, Sea-Plaintain, and Scurvy-grass 

 are also found inland, in which case they are at or near the 

 summits of our highest mountains. In this latter situation 

 these plants, instead of the salts of soda, contain salts of 

 potash. These salt-containing plants are so distinctly marked 

 that the Greek compound Halophytes, or salt plants, has been 

 formed for them. 



Now I think there can be no doubt that in some way or 

 the other — often not understood by us in our present state of 

 the knowledge — these peculiarities are efforts on the part of 

 our plants at accommodating themselves to circumstances. 

 When, for example, we consider the case of Samphire growing 

 in apparently barren chinks in the face of the chalk cliff", or 

 rooted deep in the still more barren flint shingle ; or of the 

 Sea-Campion growing also on the shingle ; or of the Sea- 

 Gromwell on the utterly bare shores of our most Northern 

 coasts, and find them all fine healthy plants, we see that they 

 must possess some power of picking up a right good living 

 where almost all plants would certainly starve. They have 

 but little soil to trust to, and that little is always either very 

 poor or very salt, and in either case unfavourable to the free 

 developement of vegetable life. Accordingly they must get 

 most of their sustenance from the air, and but little from the 

 ground in which they grow. On the driest and most parched 

 parts of the globe we find, as in the deserts of Africa, vegeta- 

 tion, and of what nature ? Cactus, or cactus-like plants without 

 exception — that is, once more, fleshy and unusually glaucous 

 plants. Now in the case of these latter it is obvious that all 

 the food they get must be from the air, and so it is no doubt 

 with our sea-side plants. 



I had once a plant of the Cactus kind, Crassula sulcata, a. 

 plant I have often seen in windows in Folkestone, and it con- 

 tinued to flower long after the whole lower part of the plant 

 was entirely dead. When I examined it I found at the bottom 

 of the still living portion of the plant a little whorl of fibre 



