8o BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE EARLY BOTANISTS 



mined from the ballast heaps about Sunderland, Newcastle, 

 and Hartlepool, but they generally disappear after a short 

 time. Weighall was elected an Associate of the Linnean 

 Society in 1799. He had died, and his herbarium passed into 

 the hands of Winch, when the latter wrote the preface to the 

 first part of his "Botanists' Guide" in 1805. 



William Backhouse, of Darlington, born 1779, died 1844, 

 who is cited by Winch in his " Botanists' Guide" as "Mr. W. 

 Backhouse, jun.," and in his Flora simply as "Mr. Backhouse." 

 He collected principally in the neighbourhood of Darlington 

 and Seaton Carew. About the former town he found J^osa 

 gracilis, Stellaria glai/ca, Lolinni arvense, Ribes nigrum, and 

 Ratmnctihis parvifloriis, this station being the northern limit 

 of the last species in England. About Seaton he found 

 Lepturus filiformis, Hordeum maritimiim, Galium tricorne, and 

 Eryngium maritiinum. He sent to Sowerby the specimens for 

 the figure oi Bromus arvensis (Engl. Bot. t. 1984), and various 

 other species. He paid some attention to Mosses, and 

 collected near Darlington Phascum patens, bryoides, and 

 curvicollum. His son, also named William Backhouse, 

 who had a fine garden at Wolsingham in Weardale, was a 

 great cultivator of Narcissi, and raised several new garden 

 forms, one of which, an intermediate between N. pseudo- 

 narcissus and incomparabilis, is called JVarcissus Backhousei. 

 Another Darlington botanist of the same period was James 

 Jansen, who collected the Darlington Willows, and whose 

 localities first appear in the 1807 volume of Winch's "Botanists' 

 Guide." 



Nathaniel John Winch, of Newcastle, born about 1769, 

 died at his house in Ridley Place in 1838. The Augustan 

 age of botany in Northumberland was from 1795 to 1835, and 

 the man who did far more than any one else both to explore 

 personally the two counties and to collect and arrange in- 

 formation obtained from others was Winch. Turner and 

 Dillwyn, writing in 1805, say of Durham (Bot. Guide, vol. i., 

 p. 239), "There is perhaps no other part of England where 

 the study of Botany, and especially the class Cryptogamia, 



