24 THE JOURKAL OF BOTANY 



less sunlight. Its seeds are water- carried, but how long they 

 remain fertile during such carriage I cannot say. For the most 

 part they depend on wind-carriage, though human carriage, 

 directly or indirectly, is common. 



Ten forms, as I call them, are given in Mr. Druce's List 

 of British Plants ; many of them are fairly common, but are 

 hardly worth considering except by specialists. There is, however, 

 another form, which I must name later, which I have not found 

 referred to in any work yet, though it is of remarkable evolu- 

 tionary interest. 



The Shepherd's Purse is recorded for every artificial division 

 of Lincolnshire ; also for thirty-three out of, say, the fifty rock- 

 soils of this county, i. e. for all that have been fully worked up to 

 date. It is found on most compound soils too. I have never yet 

 detected it on pure untouched peat, but with that exception con- 

 sider it universal. Where raw peat is mixed in any way with 

 foreign matter, and men are present, it soon appears ; as, for 

 example, on the tramway for bringing turf to the mill on 

 Thorne Waste, in West Yorkshire. In this case engine-fire 

 clinkers had alone been used to make the road-bed firmer, 

 but that was enough. The acid of the peat soon caused decom- 

 position in the added matter, and the plant was there, as 

 far as the clinker influence extended, on both sides of the rails. 

 The localities it frequents are innumerable. It is a species of 

 broken ground, whether natural or artificial. I can only give a 

 short selection of localities from my large collection of notes. 

 Approximately natural ones are becks, and river banks and sides, 

 and pasture. In these places, as sheep are specially fond of it and 

 eat it to death, it is only rarely found, unless it is protected by 

 nettle-beds, or by dung, or on bank slips, or where cattle have cut 

 up the turf, as by standing by gates or in deep wheel-tracks. In 

 man-made localities it is universal, from the macadam and old 

 stone-heap places of the roadsides, through all classes of cultiva- 

 tion, to the covering of sheltered mud-topped walls. The only 

 place where I did not expect to find it was a closely rabbit-eaten 

 little-used sand-lane at Blyton. There it was in the tracks only, as 

 it had been picked up and left by the passing wheels. When I 

 say that Anthriscus vulgaris was represented in that lane by 

 perfect little plants four to six inches high, buried in moss, it will 

 be seen what the struggle for existence is like there. 



Under the date June 23rd, 1893, 1 have the following note on the 

 Daisy : — " The purple flagged form is less eaten than the white in 

 over-stocked pasture." At this distance of time I do not remem- 

 ber the circumstances under which this note was originally made. 

 I bothered myself about the purple or " Abel Daisy " over thirty 

 years ago, and called this colour-form, for the sake of distinction, 

 pascica, but have few special "stock" records in regard to it. I 

 never expected to meet with another species showing a like 

 evolutionary tendency, but Capsella does. The little parish of 

 Newstead, on Ancholme-by-Brigg, is a farm which was one of the 

 original Gilbertine priories, founded by Henry II. in the year 1173. 



