THE MOSSES, HEPATICiE AND LICHENS OF 



GUERNSEY. 



BY MR. E. D. MARQUAND. 



Twelve months ago, in presenting you the list of the 

 Flowering Plants of Guernsey, which has since been published 

 in the Transactions of this Society, I intimated my intention 

 of following it up with a series of papers on the Cryptogamic 

 Flora of the island. In part fulfilment of that promise I have 

 to-day to lay before you the result of three or four winters' 

 work among the Mosses, Hepaticse and Lichens ; and although 

 the lists which follow have no pretensions to absolute com- 

 pleteness, they plainly show that Guernsey presents a rich 

 and fertile field which will abundantly repay a diligent and 

 careful scrutiny. 



Here again among the cryptogams, as among the 

 flowering plants, we find the same conspicuous absence of 

 many common and generally distributed species; quite a 

 number of mosses and lichens which abound in precisely 

 similar parts of Devonshire and Cornwall appear to be entirely 

 unknown in Guernsey. To whatever cause this may be 

 attributed, it adds a peculiar interest to the Sarnian Flora, 

 whilst at the same time rendering it all the more necessary 

 that the work of recording the plants of the island, with their 

 local range and distribution, should be conducted with the 

 utmost care, especially in the case of minute or obscure 

 species. Several undoubted additions which I have in hand 

 at the present time cannot now be included in these lists, as 

 their identification is uncertain, owing to the amount of 

 collected material being small or in poor condition. 



The only published list of Guernsey mosses, as far as I 

 know, is that contained in Ansted's " Channel Islands," which 

 was printed thirty years ago. It is a bare catalogue of names, 

 alphabetically arranged, and is unfortunately very imperfect 

 and misleading. Quite twenty mosses of general occurrence 

 throughout this island are omitted from the list altogether, 

 while on the other hand several species are included which 

 I feel tolerably certain were never collected in Guernsey. 

 It is not my business to criticise the list of Jersey mosses 

 given in the same work, but I may just point out that if, 



