REPORT OF WORK IN 1915 IN KANSU AND TIBET. 343 
plant in cultivation, the zeal with which it germinates and grows and 
flowers, and goes on flowering and growing, without fad of any sort in 
any decent situation. As for its beauty, few can rival it. The rosette 
is neat as that of P. farinosa, and often wonderfully daisy-like ; while 
the three to four-inch stem unfolds in June a large head of noble large 
lavender blossoms, sweetly scented, and with a white eye ! I know 
none to beat, and few to equal, P. stenocalyx in its own particular 
line. It abounds all through the alpine region, too, giving clear sign 
of its healthy nature ; from the hot loess banks and cliffs (in slight 
shade only, from their aspect) about Tien Tang, in the hot valley of the 
Da-Tung, not only up through all the rocky outcrops of the mountain 
coppice up to Wolvesden, but higher yet and higher, right out on to the 
alps themselves, where in the crags and corries and chines it ascends 
imperturbably to the very summits themselves — quite the most 
widely-ranged Primula I have ever met — and often disappointingly 
so to eyes hungering for a different species from that one thought 
one had said good-bye to four thousand feet below. Imagine finding 
P. Palinuri on the crest of the Matterhorn j the profusion of P. steno - 
calyx is yet more grotesquely catholic. And thus this plant also has 
been the mother of confusions. Besides probably being P. cognata, 
there is little doubt that in the course of her huge range she has also 
been P. leptopoda and P. Biondiana. One source of confusion my 
own researches brought to light. For while, up to ten thousand feet, 
P. stenocalyx is absolutely powderless in scape and rosette and foliage, 
at higher elevations this form is abruptly and without transition 
replaced by another absolutely identical in every way but that the 
scapes and the reverse of the rather stiffer leaves are clothed in a dense 
vesture of white meal, which yet further enhances the beauty of those 
loose dwarf heads of big blue-purple white-eyed blossoms, the size of 
P. carniolica's on a stem shorter than that of P. farinosa. In culti- 
vation I have already spoken of its outrageous vigour ; I will only add 
that so diverse are the great rosettes that develop from its packets that 
no one can easily believe they all spring out of seed of the same species. 
It gave me one poor and one magnificent albino j also copious 
photographs of both forms, and a rather inadequate painting. I 
hope to end the confusion round this name by calling the valley 
form, without powder, P. stenocalyx genuina ; while the powdered 
high-alpine development stands as P. stenocalyx dealbata. It is inter- 
esting to find that from the earliest seedling stages the differentiation 
of powder or no powder holds invariably good. The solitary con- 
vincing exception was that one specimen, in a frameful of typical 
P. stenocalyx genuina (the lot sent home as P. cognata, F 195, in 
1914), has turned out no less typically P. stenocalyx dealbata. 
P. tangutica excludes P. Maximowiczii in the Da-Tung, abundant 
and often gigantic in the scrub of the alpine valleys. But I grow 
more and more firm in my conviction that there is no solid distinction 
between the two ; they are merely two named developments of an 
ugly dowdy aggregate — so really ugly, indeed, that I carefully refrained 
