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ILLUSTRATIONS OF 
exotic Iris Xlphium, which is stated by that writer to 
have been found by the Duchess Dowager of Port- 
land by the river side near Fladbury," where no 
other person has since been able to detect it^ and 
where, if the plant really existed, it must have been 
an outcast from a garden. On this authority, however, 
the plant figured for some years in our British Floras, 
but is now excluded by all accurate writers. 
A circumstance of much interest, as connected with 
the Natural History of the county, and as having 
some reference to the department we are now engaged 
in, I shall here advert to, because it relates to a 
question of much importance — the disappearance of 
certain diseases. 
Within h ss than half a century a considerable 
portion of the land in the vales of the Severn, the 
Avon, and the Teme, was little better than a complete 
marsh, and the local history of situations of this 
kind, as given by the older inhabitants, represents 
ague as having been a frequent visitor. So much, 
indeed, have I understood, did this disease prevail 
fifty years ago, in the marshy vale below Malvern, that 
the vicar of the parish used every Sunday morning, 
before church, to give away large quantities of a 
remedy, for its cure, to the poor of the parish. 
Since these lands have been drained a case of ague is 
a rare occurrence : but in investigating the Botany 
of the spots in which this disease has occurred, we 
find in abundance those vegetable productions that 
grow in marshy situations ; — as the Iris, Scirpus^ 
JEquisetuniy Drosera, and Colchicum. 
