3i6 Lees: Bnh'sh diid Alien. Phvit-Lists. 



are avoided, save where specilic names differ, i.e., the Cranberry 

 (Oxycoceus, Hill) is Gilibert's quadripetala but palustris of 

 Persoon. The late greatly lamented W. R. Linton, author of 

 an almost perfect Flora (that of Derbyshire), and of the most 

 illuminative and up-to-date account of the British Hieracia 

 has brought the Hieracium part of it, Nos. 932 to 1064 inclusive, 

 ' as far as possible up-to-date ' by the light accorded him 

 through correspondence with ' Scandinavian experts.' The 

 Rev. E. F. Linton's Salix list, Nos. 1497 to 1516, has shrunken 

 since Edn. 8th (1886) from 31 ' species ' to 20 ; whilst the titles 

 which represented the 30, over a score of these shew as what 

 they are — Hybrids naked and unashamed. One cannot but 

 be glad of this careful investigation into our British ' species ' 

 since that date, not Willows alone, but Mints, Orchids, 

 Pondweeds and Sedges, some genera of Grasses, Scrophulariae, 

 Onagraceae, Saxifrages, Potentillas, Violas, Caryophylls and 

 Eye-brights, having demonstrably been in the habit, or acquir- 

 ing the trick of hybridising. This was either not always the 

 case, or botanists in Smith's and Boswell-Syme's day were 

 lacking in flair for open-air field study. I rather incline to the 

 former view, that a cycle in the existence and assurgence (so 

 to say) of certain genera, Brambles markedly, has been reached 

 in the past half-century in Britain, which has given stamen and 

 pistil their Natural Chance ! — ^their field arrived, their innings 

 come, the wide-eyed open-air botanists of the Newer School, 

 bringing a greater intellectual wealth of associated ideas 

 to bear upon field-fiower collecting and connotation, have 

 shrewdly spotted ' species ' (so to say, again, for lack of a better 

 word) in the act of self creation ! The term ' species ' is ours 

 not theirs be it remembered. The Mints even illustrate this — 

 Dame Nature has ' straddled across the growing Mint ' as the 

 folk-lore phrase has it, without law or license, since the sweet 

 saucy Mentha spicata (viridis) was forethoughtfuUy brought 

 across the water ; and Mentha ' rubra,' Mentha ' gentilis ' and 

 suspectedly another yet of our ' native ' group have been born, 

 grown up, and colonised ! We may well have sought for years 

 and years to re-discover or identify the ' Mentha pratensis ' 

 of Sole, and Wiltshire (on paper) for the reason it was likely 

 a passing phase of the family which could not perpetuate its 

 kind. Hybrids, infertile and unstable at first, with time and 

 the proper degree of dilution of their cell-syncrasies (probably) 

 become more and more a race with fixed cognizable differences : 



Naturalist, 



