Lees : Two New Lincolnshire Cryptogams. 99 



stumbled upon it is easily distinguished from B. rutahulum by the seta 

 bearing the capsule being perfectly smooth, whilst that of B. rutahulum 

 under a lens appears to be encrusted with numerous granular asperi- 

 ties. In habit the mosses are alike. Under a good lens the leaves 

 of salehrosum are less striate and comparatively narrower, and hence 

 look more acuminate, whilst the nerve reaches up the centre of the 

 leaf rather further than in rutahulum. These are comparative 

 differences only. The sporangium, or capsule is, in both species, very 

 similar ; but its lid is a cone narrowing regularly to a point in mle- 

 brosum ; whilst in rutahulum its shape, a cone, too, approximates 

 more nearly to the form of a peg-top, narrowing with a bowed curve 

 for half its length, then more evenly at a different angle, to a point, 

 but terminating in a mdden sharp heah^ just as a peg-top ends in its 

 iron spike. 



And now for the fact that induces me to think the two mosses may 

 often be confused in the field, and the one accounted much the rarer 

 in reality only overlooked. A day or two after my attention had 

 been drawn by Mr. Boswell to the structural differences I have 

 attempted to describe, I was, for purposes connected with the moss 

 chapter of my forthcoming " West Yorkshire " Flora, looking 

 through several packets of B. rutahulum collected by me at different 

 times in the West-Riding, when lo ! in one of them amongst a 

 a matted specimen of true B. rutahulum I saw there were a few young 

 but fine fruiting bits of B. salehrosum ! The moss in the packet was 

 duly labelled as gathered (in 1876) by a rivulet which runs at the foot 

 of Ledsham Park, near Kippax ; and I have a distinct recollection of 

 the excursion — a most pleasant one, in which Mr. William Todd of 

 Leeds was my companion — and even of the circumstances under which 

 that tuft was gathered : evening was approaching, and feeling pleasur- 

 able pangs of anticipation as to tea awaiting me, I hurried down the 

 streamside towards the pretty little inn of Ledsham with its ever 

 obliging hostess, who, I remember, ministered to some natural wants 

 most successfully. This delayed discovery — if I may so style it — does 

 not add a new species to the West Riding Flora, but the previous 

 records, one of which is William Wilson's, are very old ones. 



Apropos of rare mosses, I may as well yield to a gossipy inclina- 

 tion, and state that recently Dr J. S. Wesley has detected both 

 Cylindrothecium concinnum and Eurhynchium piliferum near Wetherby. 

 These mosses have a particularly similar physiognomy, and the former 

 is an uncommon species of xerophilous — dry, or limestone-loving — 

 type, montane in its restriction usually, and not hitherto recorded for 

 the tract of Permian Limestone. 



