Botanical. 7031 



secondly/, making it accessible to every pocket. It is in this spirit that 

 this butterfly number has been conceived and carried out. The por- 

 traits of all our British butterflies have been admirably drawn 

 by Mr. Willis, and equally well engraved by Mr. Kirchner. The 

 descriptions are all written by myself, from the butterflies themselves, 

 and there are no italics, abbreviations, or signs of any kind : in each 

 description are a few words, used in a sense somewhat different from 

 that assigned to them in our dictionaries : such words are explained 

 and illustrated by a diagram ; and every description has been kindly 

 revised by Mr. Bond. I fear that a few readers of the * Zoologist,' 

 sticklers for the technical, will frown awfully on this first attempt to 

 supply Natural History for the million ; but to a large majority I 

 confidently appeal to aid my efforts by introducing the Butterfly 

 Number into every school in their neighbourhood, and into every 

 family where there are boys and girls in want of occupation. 



Botanist's Corner. 



Woodsia alpina on the Breadalbane Mountains. — Last summer, when rambling 

 among the Breadalbane mountains, in company with my father and Thomas West- 

 corabe, I met with Woodsia alpina in abundance. We were fortunate enough to find 

 a locality which, to all appearance, had never been examined by botanists before, and 

 where the plant was growing with a luxuriance and profusion that realised one's ideas 

 of what " ought to be somewhere." Imagine us revelling in the sight of tufts of this 

 rarity bearing sixty-five, eighty, and even a hundred fronds each, some of these four 

 inches long. I think I remember one spot where I could see seven tufts without 

 moving a step. They are in many instances difficult of access, and some cannot be 

 reached without extreme danger. One noble tuft of fifty strong fronds (apparently) 

 can be easily seen, but even a daring and skilful cragsman would have to satisfy him- 

 self with this. We subsequently found fourteen plants of W. Ilvensis among the 

 Dumfriesshire mountains, some of them fine and well developed. The Dumfriesshire 

 plant is the true W. Ilvensis, and very different from the true W. alpina of the Bread- 

 albane district. In cultivation, and even in a wild state, forms of W. Ilvensis may 

 be found approximating W. alpina in appearance; but no one who has seen the dense 

 erect tufts of the latter in a wild state can, I think, doubt the specific distinctness of 

 the two. I believe Prof. Balfour's Woodsia hyperborea of the Clova mountains to be 

 W. Ilvensis. I have seen W. Ilvensis frequently in the Clova district, but never a 

 single plant of W. alpina ; and a plant procured from thence, and marked W. hyper- 

 borea, in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh, was W. Ilvensis. — James Back- 

 home, jun.; York, January 4, 1860. 



[I think there is little doubt that the Woodsia hyperborea of Hooker, Balfour and 

 other British authors is identical with W. Ilvensis, and I think Babington right in 

 making but one species out of the specimens known to him ; but the true Woodsia 



