BOTANY 
Surrey, at Edlesborough and Ellesborough in Bucks, etc., but which 
in most of its habitats in Britain is certainly an introduced shrub. A 
specially interesting species is the grass Phleum phalaroides, which at one 
time was wrongly called P. Boehmeri, and has a peculiarly restricted area 
in Britain in the counties of Beds, Herts, Essex, Cambridge and Suffolk. 
The beautiful pasque flower (Anemone Pulsatilla) still occurs in the 
locality given by Abbot, on Barton Hills, with the mountain cat’s-foot 
(Antennaria dioica), a very rare species in the southern midlands, although 
known in Northants, Oxfordshire, etc. A rare species of charad, Nite//a 
mucronata, was found by Mr. C. Davis in 1882 in the Ouse. 
BOTANOLOGIA 
As will be gathered from the foregoing notes the foundation of 
Bedfordshire botany was laid by the Rev. Charles Abbot, D.D., who 
was born probably at Winchester about 1761, and was vicar of Oakley 
Raynes and Goldington, Beds. He was elected a fellow of the Linnean 
Society in 1793 and in 1798 published the Flora of Bedfordiensis. He 
became D.D. Oxon in 1802. His herbarium is still preserved at Turvey 
Abbey, and has been critically examined by Mr. R. A. Pryor, B.A., 
F.L.S. (the author of the Flora of Herts), who published some interest- 
ing details respecting it in the ‘fournal of Botany, x. (1881) 40 et seq. ; 
and Mr. E. M. Holmes, F.L.S., has also reported on the lichens and alge. 
Dr. Abbot was a frequent correspondent of Sir James E. Smith, to whom 
he sent many specimens, several of which are figured and described in 
English Botany. He also noticed Asarum europeum in the Thames valley. 
The Flora Bedfordiensis included not only the flowering plants and 
the higher cryptogams, but also the mosses, liverworts, lichens, alge and 
fungi ; though, owing to changes already alluded to, many species are 
no longer to be found in the stations mentioned by Abbot, and some are, 
it is to be feared, no longer existing in the county. 
These missing species include the fen orchis (Ma/axis paludosa), a 
tiny plant which once grew on the sphagnum bogs at Potton, the 
cranberry (Vaccinium Oxycoccos or Oxycoccos quadripetala), the petty whin 
(Genista anglica), the Lancashire asphodel (Narthecium ossifragum), which 
grows at Brickhill just outside our area, the black bog rush (Schaenus 
nigricans), the white beaked bog rush (Rynchospora alba), the deer’s club- 
tush (Scirpus c@espitosus), the marsh St. John’s wort (Hypericum elodes), 
the marsh fern (Lastrea or Dryopteris Thelypteris), the horse-tail (Eguzse- 
tum hyemale) and the flea bane (Pulicaria vulgaris) ; and the extinction or 
diminution of these may all be attributed to drainage or cultivation. 
Among others which cultivation has either extirpated or rendered 
much more rare, are the maiden pink (Dianthus deltoides), the cress 
(Draba muralis), the star thistle (Centaurea Calcitrapa) and the grass 
Glyceria distans ; the latter Abbot called Poa retroflexa. The misnomers 
in Abbot’s Flora! include Spergula pentandra, by which probably a form 
See papers in Fournal of Botany (1881), pp. 40-6, 66-73. 
I 41 6 
