226 Lees ; In Defence of fames Bolton, the Fnngologist. 



described with such precision grow now where he got the speci- 

 mens his plates were drawn from. A hundred years makes 

 a sad hack-up of any locality list : more of lower forms than 

 higher because the conditions they exist under change and 

 alternate more rapidly. Nay, chapter and verse are given too 

 rigidly — they bear the impress of truth in how they enthused 

 him at the discovering — for me to doubt. Let me quote one 



example only: (p. 729 of Cat. in Hist.) Hippuris 'It 



is to be found in a piece of very unsound land near Mixenden- 

 mill, and also in Norland, about the edge of Old-house Mill- 

 dam. The flower of this beautiful plant is, perhaps, the most 

 simple in all nature, having neither calix nor petal, but consists 

 of only one stamen and one pistil followed by a single seed.' 



Can anybody in his senses doubt that Bolton found this, or — 

 worse still — think he described it (so con amove !) from Hudson's 

 ' Flora ' without finding it ? The supposition is monstrous. 

 The phrase, 'unsound land,' the mills (there yet) named, one of 

 the particulars the result of his own observation, not to be 

 gathered from Hudson, all to my mind leave no halfway house 

 between absolute belief that it grew there in 1774 ; or that his 

 memory is not one to be revered ! And all Bolton's records are 

 of 'a piece,' as Yorkshire clothiers say; they are warped and 

 wefted with internal evidence of their general reliability. 



As to Bolton's authorship : we have (I think) not his own 

 admission of an ' open secret ' among savans of the time ; but 

 the manuscript was seen by my late friend the Rev. W. W. 

 Newbould, and he said it was in Bolton's old style hand, and 

 agreed with notes, etc., to the Original Drawings of the 'History 

 of Ferns,' Pts. i. and ii., now in the Botanical Department of the 

 British Museum. Furthermore the Cat. of 1775 includes Blasia, 

 and hundreds of Musci, Lichens and Fungi (Hydnum imbricatum, 

 notably — ' I found this in North Dean in Greetland in pretty 

 great plenty' — the stations and remarks on which are repeated 

 word for word in the amplified ' Fungusses,' showing that 

 Bolton was a student of some attainment (for that day) in 

 Fungology, thirteen years before his ' History ' was issued), and 

 that oft repeated personal pronoun, ' I,' ' I,' ' I,' clinches the 

 argument in favour of Bolton being the compiler for Watson of 

 the History's Catalogue. 



I could go on — and give Teesdale's contemporar\ T testimony 

 of 179S, ''Plantce Eboracenses' '; and likewise the quotations in 

 the 2nd Edn. of Hudson's ' Flora Anglica,.' where in 1778, 

 ' Bolton ' is credited in that ' prope Halifax' with the record 

 for Campamda hederacea which first appeared in 1775— three 

 years earlier — on p. 732 of this wrongfully assailed Catalogue. 



Naturalist, 



