Flowering Plants. 



263 



The hedges are the highways and footpaths of all the 

 animals. The life of the country courses along- them as the 

 blood through our veins and arteries, and through their endless 

 ramifications, like minutest capillaries, it vivifies the whole 

 land. The birds follow the friendly screen of the boughs, and 

 the little beasts move safely along the banks and through the 

 ditches and pass out of sight from field to field ; so that probably 

 many a hedgehog, though about every night in the summer — 

 a sizeable beast, too, and one neither able nor very anxious to 

 evade an approaching footstep — lives a long life and dies of 

 old age unseen by human eye. 



When from some vantage-point we look down upon a wide 

 stretch of our fair English land, as from the Hambledon Hills 

 on the Vale of York, or from the North Downs on the Weald of 

 Sussex, or from Malvern on the Severn Plain, the view is like 

 that of an open wood, so countless are the hedges, so numerous 

 the forest trees sprinkled along them. Not a road, hardly 

 a footpath, but is bordered by them. The land owes half its 

 beauty to them. The whole 'pageant of summer' is enacted 

 under their branches, from the first violets and primroses to the 

 latest berries of autumn : here the birds love and sing and all 

 the wild animals hold their revels. We look upon these hedge- 

 rows and (like the Ancient Mariner) we ' bless them in our 

 heart,' for without them our country would no longer be the 

 Merrie England that we love. 



FLOWERING PLANTS, 

 Mertensia maritima in Walney Island. — In Mr. J. Cosmo 

 Melvill's article on botany in the ' Court Guide and County Blue 

 Book of Lancashire ' he states that this plant is ' probably nearly 

 or quite extinct on Walney.' I am glad to record that during 

 a visit to the Island on nth June I counted about a score of 

 plants in one locality. — Harper Gaythorpe, Barrow-in-Furness, 

 13th June 1904. 



Abnormal Willow-herb in Spen Valley. — While looking 

 for a recurrence of the abnormal Figwort recorded in ' The 

 Naturalist,' 1903, page 383, although unable to find another 

 specimen, curiously enough I saw within two yards of the spot 

 where it grew a similar abnormality in the Willow-herb 

 (Epilobunn rnontanuni). One shoot of this specimen had three 

 leaves at each node instead of the normal two. The arrange- 

 ment of the flowers was normal.— T. Castle, Heckmondwike, 

 7th June 1904. 



1904 September i. 



