312 



Lccs : BritisJi and Alien Plant-Lists. 



these days of dumping imports, whether as raw food-stuffs, 

 cotton-tibre, fodder, hides, fleeces, plumage of birds or earth 

 itself as ore or ballast, the collector may (and does) find almost 

 anything in the germ line trying conclusions with our indigens, 

 inland or littorally, fulliUing more or less completely the behest 

 of palinureing Phc^bus to bring forth its like, and possess the 

 earth. This is not ' writ sarcastic,' nor is it a rediictio ad 

 absurd It 111, since we all of us ' want to know ' the st^de and 

 title at least of the creatures that introduce themselves to our 

 notice when we take our walks abroad ; and, unfortunately, 

 nor the Groves's edition of Babington's Manual, nor Dunn's 

 Alien Flora of Great Britain give us much more than a stone 

 (seed) name in response to our cry for bread (flower of the 

 understanding). We have Loudon, his Eiicyclopcedia of 

 Plants of 1S49, certainh^ describing over 18,000 ' species ' (as 

 then understood) with small woodcuts of nearly 10,000 of them ; 

 but our modern herbarist is to-day an analyst and a ' splitter ' 

 rather than a Lindleyan or a Benthamite, and so dubs the 

 goodh' tome of thirteen hundred, pages, rococo and a weariness 

 to the eyes. Nevertheless it is wonderful yet ; and, here and 

 there, propheticalh' and ])resciently affords us a ' light ' to our 

 acrostic of the field which all else denies. To give only one 

 illuminating example. Item 844* of the loth edition of the 

 London Catalogue of British Plants is ' Inula britannica, L. i.', 

 and the same species appears in G. C. Druce's masterly Oxford 

 List of British Plants as ' *i28i britannica, L. Eur. ; [Leicester]'. 

 (Also Yorkshire, ' native ' J. G. Baker, A^. Yks. and Hooker's 

 Students' Flora, ed. 3, 207 — it is the Elecampanj'^ of Skip- 

 bridge and Thorp-arch, given under 7. Heleniiim in my W. Yks^ 

 Flora), but for information how this British plant, named after 

 our island in 1753 b}-^ Linnaeus himself, differs from the Sun- 

 weed of the Orient which sprang from Lena's tears, we are 

 driven, to-day, to desuete Loudon, p. 714, No. 12149 ; where 

 below I. Helenium, (said to grow to 4 feet, and have amplexicaul 

 leaves, somewhat toothed ovate rugged downy beneath, scales of 

 the involucre downy) we find ' britannica, W.' [Willdenow, who 

 grew it in the Berhn garden, and described it therefrom] ' erect- 

 ing rooted perennial, 2 feet in stature, yellow flowered, 1759, 

 Germany ' [but it is Helenium which is Prussian, and britannica 

 which is British] ' leaves amplexicaul lanceolate serrated at base, 

 pilose beneath, with a villous corymbose stem.' In this we have 

 sufficient dilferentiation betwixt the two, but probabh^ not one 



Naturalist, 



