54*, ACANTHACEM. — 55. LAMIACE. 543 
54%, ACANTHACER. 
Acanthus mollis, Linn. 
Province 1. Near Penzance; Jones Tour, 31. “ Scilly Isles.” 
Alien. Cyb. ii. 232. iii.475. Phytol.iv.408. “ A.N.H. viii. 505.” 
55. LamMraceez. 
Salvia clandestina, Linn. 
Province 1. Lizard Point, West Cornwall; Bab. man. 
Ambiguity. Cyb. ii. 234. The corolla of Verbenaca elongates 
after first expansion, and thus perhaps gave occasion to make out 
a second species in England. The figure in Eng. Bot. 154 repre- 
sents the corolla with the short tube of its earliest expansion, not 
as seen when elongated beyond the calyx. 
Elsholtzia cristata, Willd. 
Province - - 3. Middlesex, 1856, lost in 1857. Scarcely admissible. 
Casual. T. D. flora, with reference to Irvine’s Handbook. 
Menthe Bakeriane. 
In the Journal of Botany for August, 1865, Mr. J. G. Baker 
published an article “On the English Mints.” He groups these 
proteiform plants into thirteen species, exclusive of Pulegium. 1n 
English Botany, third edition, Dr. Boswell Syme has, “for the 
most part, adopted the views of Mr. Baker,” as expressed in the 
paper referred to. In the Manual of British Botany, sixth 
edition, Professor Babington keeps some of the Bakerian species 
in combination; thus reducing the number into nine. In the 
Synopsis, pages 267-9, only six aggregates are treated. These 
half-dozen correspond with the Babingtonian species, except that 
viridis was omitted, as not being a real native; and no account 
was taken of alopecuroides and pratensis, known to me imperfectly 
by garden examples only. Among plants so readily multiplied 
through division of roots, all the garden examples of any one 
variety may have been only a single plant originally. 
To me now it would be an useless and most uninteresting 
trouble to relearn Mints by the species and varieties of Mr. 
Baker’s selection. I regard them, especially the varieties, simply 
as optional and arbitrary, as artificial arrangements of dried speci- 
mens and of portraits of individual plants; any other botanist 
having equal right to make either more or fewer species and 
varieties out of the same materials; and being just as likely to be 
correct by doing so. My indifference to them is not lessened by 
the circumstance that Mr. Baker enters very slightly into topo- 
graphical details; his scanty citation of localities warrantably 
suggesting that his arrangement rests really on a narrow experience 
altogether, as well in himself as in those from whom he adopts or 
