62 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
Berberis sp. (F 357) is near the last, and, being a late autumn 
find, en route, I cannot yet say more about it, especially as I 
myself have never seen it. (Coll. W. Purdom.) 
Berberis sp. (F 358). — A rather gawky, angular, and mangy bush 
of 3-4 feet, occurring in the higher alpine coppice of Thunder- 
crown, with clustered oval berries. 
Berberis sp. (F 359). — Possibly a form of the last ; from Yang-sa. 
(Coll. W. Purdom.) 
Berberis sp. (F 360). — A beautiful, elegant, and aspiring slight bush 
of 5-6 feet, with its tall Stance arches copiously set with " dropping 
wells " of blood and fire. From the alpine coppice ascending to 
Lotus Mountain. 
Berberis sp. (F 361). — Another alpine ugliness from Thundercrown, 
about 2-3 feet high, leggy and sparse and stiff, with paired fruits, 
and long pale thorns of a quite especial vindictiveness and venom. 
Betula Bhojpattra, if F 298 be B. Bhojpattra indeed, is a most noble 
forest tree, rigidly confined to an 8,000-9,000-feet limit in the cool 
alpine woods of the great mountain ranges, where it constitutes, 
in its clearly-marked zone, the chief of the timber. It is of 
stiff, gnarled habit, growing into a wide, dome-headed tree of 
30-40 feet, with the bark all ravelling away in tabs of dull 
diaphanous scarlet, till in spring its forests are a haze of lilac and 
rose before the young emerald of the foliage breaks, and never 
again loses its first, fine, careless rapture of spring green until 
the latest winds of autumn have swept it whirling. Yet, even 
so, this wonderful tree is almost more beautiful still in its wintry 
nakedness, when it is all a bloomy mist of lavender-blueness 
faintly shot with rose, making a unique effect of arrested fog 
amid the sombre columns of the spruces. B. Bhojpattra appears 
to insist on damp and cool air ; on the desiccated ridge above 
Siku it lingers only here and there on the flanks of the gorges, 
but in all the big main ranges of E. Tibet it abounds, and its 
boughs provide the peasants with cartwheels, while its folios of 
torn red bark come in for water-buckets, hats, and butter- 
wrappings. It should be a superb acquisition for Northern 
England and Scotland, though perhaps too insistent on alpine 
coolness of conditions for the drier South. 
Betula sp. (F 333) is probably only B. alba. It is common in lower 
alpine woods, not competing with B. Bhojpattra. There is also 
F 470, another kindred Birch, not yet differentiated. (Coll. 
Chinese headman.) 
Bosa hygrometrica (F 261) is very general throughout the hotter, lower 
loess region of South Kansu, haunting the cooler vertical faces of 
black primary rock (or hollows round the feet of boulders) all 
up the course of the Blackwater, always in a strictly horizontal 
position, and there making a precise copy of Jankaea Heldreichii 
in the flat and shaggy silver-haired rosette, until in July up spring 
a number of naked 4-inch scapes, each expanding into a loose 
