328 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
comes out into the grateful warmth of the Red Basin of Szechwan ; 
and for yet another ten days or so we traversed rolling russet uplands 
terraced with rice, and peppered with dark junipers and pines as green 
as those of Provence, before taking a junk at Bao-ning, and thence 
descending in tired tranquillity down the long and frantic coilings of 
the Ja-ling-jang, till it reaches Chung King and merges in the Da-Hor, 
which' only a foreigner talks of as the Yang-dz' Jang. Down this then 
we proceeded by one of the pot-bellied double-barrelled steamers 
that now ply ; and in ever-increasing sadness of conclusion, with the 
great Alps fading so irrecoverably remote in the distances of memory, 
traversed the famous and over-famous Gorges of the Yang-dz', and 
concluded finally in the unutterable depression of Ichang, that flat 
monotony of town and shore and country as far as eye can see, sullen 
under the grey sky, with even the dim little ranges of Hupeh dwindled 
into a mere rurfle along the western horizon. Having left Wolvesden 
on September 13, it was on December 8, after two seasons of the blessed 
wilderness, that we landed up once more in the capital, now feverishly 
preparing to become an Imperial city again. 
COLLECTIONS OF 1915. 
The following list gives the more important of the plants collected 
or seen in flower in 1915 ; if their number and tale of novelties do 
not equal those of the previous year I assure you that the Alps, and 
not their explorer, are to blame ; further, many species that were 
glorious novelties in 1914 prove to have so wide a range that they are 
the stale commonplaces of the next season. 
Aconitum sp., A. Anthora gilvum ? (F 739.)' — This is a very large, 
tall, voluminous Aconite, abundant all over the scrubby foothills of 
the Da-Tung, and up to ten thousand feet in the more open copses 
about Wolvesden House, with handsome foliage and tall dense spires 
of narrow squeezed flowers in a curiously attractive and rather morbid 
shade of dull pale lilac. 
Aconitum sp. F 798 exists only, alas, in specimens and a photo- 
graph. It was a singularly fascinating thing, with a dense dwarf 
obelisk of very large flowers, papery-silky in texture, and in colouring 
suggesting smoke-grey chiffon over a sky-blue " slip," squatting close 
upon a low mass of magnificent glossy foliage, roundly lobed. This 
was a child of only the very highest stone slopes at the topmost limits # 
of vegetation, and bloomed only at the end of August. Seed, there- 
fore, was unprocurable, and of the plants I brought away there is no 
more to tell. 
Adenophora sp. (F 583) may not have been distributed. Its best 
picture is that of an ordinary harebell, but magnified, and much stiffer. 
It occurred in the lower grassy places down Wolf stone Dene, and 
though pretty enough in its uniflorous small alpine development 
(in the river shingles opposite Wolvesden House) to merit painting 
in an emptier moment, was not worth collecting on any full, scale- 
