308 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
work, as in all others right down to the most recent " Dahlias " by 
George Gordon, published four years ago, the Marchioness of Bute, 
sometimes called Lady Bute, is credited with the original introduction 
of the Dahlia into England from Madrid in 1789. 
It would be tedious to the reader to furnish other extracts, and the 
selection may be brought to a close by a brief mention that Folkard 
in his " Plant Lore " and the Hon. Mrs. Evelyn Cecil in her " History 
of Gardening in England " also concur in the fact as related by the other 
writers. 
Against such an array of what one might reasonably suppose to be 
authoritative evidence it might have seemed to some amateurs like 
myself an act of temerity to dispute a fundamental historic state- 
ment, accepted by such well recognized and capable authorities. But 
it must, I submit, be admitted that no statement of historical fact is 
worthy of our credence unless it can be substantiated by contemporary 
corroborative evidence ; and as this was wanting, as will be seen later, 
the conclusion was forced upon me that the statement of these writers, 
some of whom had obviously copied their historic matter from their 
predecessors, without independent investigation on their part, must be 
wrong. 
So firmly was I convinced of this that I determined to go through 
the whole of the available Dahlia literature, a task of far greater 
magnitude than some of the modern Dahlia writers are aware of, 
especially when one of them begins his opening lines by saying : 
" Information available for the history of the Dahlia is not as plentiful 
as we could wish." Anyone who starts in this way advertises the 
fact pretty clearly that he practically knows nothing whatever of the 
matter. There is, as the references in this paper clearly show, an 
abundance of literary and historical material on the subject if the 
student will only take the necessary trouble to discover where it is to 
be obtained. 
And apart from the large number of monographs on the Dahlia in 
English, French, and German, of which I have given in my " Florist's 
Bibliography " the titles of no fewer than forty-eight separate works 
without counting societies' publications, there are scattered here and 
there throughout the whole range of botanical and horticultural general 
literature many important articles by authors eminent for the work 
they have accomplished in connexion with the Dahlia. 
Of these I shall quote a few of the most serviceable for my purpose, 
and in doing so it will be seen that we are led still nearer to the point 
from which it is certain that the disputed statement originated. It is 
just here that it seems to be useful to remind the reader that whatever 
varieties the Marchioness of Bute introduced and in whatever year the 
introduction took place they were ultimately lost as alleged, and that 
the evidence is overwhelming and conclusive that the flower was 
introduced a second time into England by Lady Holland in 1804. It 
would occupy too much time and is not material for present purposes 
to do more than just state the fact. 
