BIOGRAPHY 
XXV 
have thus come into my hands, as Mr. Mitten's executor. The 
series appears to be complete from August 25, 1843, to August 
5, 1848 — 66 in all. This last letter, like the great majority 
of the series, is about details in the structure and classification of 
Mosses and Hepaticse, but a postscript states that, as he is soon 
coming to London to superintend the sale by auction of the late 
Dr. Taylor's herbarium, he hopes to meet Mr. Borrer. The 
letters are, however, full of interest, and enable me both to give 
a connected sketch of his occupations after giving up scholastic 
work, and also, by suitable extracts, to give some idea of his 
character and opinions. 
More than thirty years later, when describing a new genus of 
Amazonian Hepaticae in the Journal of Botajiy, and noticing that 
a British species (yOdo7itochisma Sphagni) grows with it though 
not on a Sphagnum, he gives us in a footnote the following 
very interesting bit of nature-study combined with archaeology, 
which is so characteristic that I will here quote it nearly entire, 
especially as it refers to one of his excursions with Mr. Borrer. 
He writes : — 
" On our own moors I have far oftener seen Odo?itoschisma 
Sphagni growing on Leucobryum glaucum than on Sphagna. Now 
that the steam-plough is fast obliterating the small remnant of 
moors in the Vale of York, it is worth while recording something 
about the Leucobryum, as seen on Strensall Moor, five to six 
miles north of York. There it forms immense rounded hassocks, 
some of which in my youth were as much as three feet high ; and 
although the ground whereon they grew is now drained and 
ploughed out, I am told that on another part of the moor there 
are still left a few hassocks about two feet high. When the late 
Mr. Wilson first saw them, thirty years ago, he took them at a 
distance for sheep ; as he approached them he changed his mind 
for haycocks ; but when he actually came up and saw what they 
were he was astonished, and declared he had never seen such 
gigantic moss-tufts elsewhere. During seven consecutive years 
that I saw them frequently, I could observe no sensible increase 
in height. The very slight annual outgrowth of the marginal 
branches is comparable to the outermost twigs of an old tree, and 
is almost or quite counterbalanced by the soft, imperfectly elastic 
mass incessantly decaying and settling down at the base ; so that 
these tufts of Leucobryum may well be almost as secular as our 
Oaks or Elms ; and some of them might even be coming into 
existence, if not so far back as when the warders of Bootham Bar 
and Monk Bar (the northern entrances to York) used to hear the 
wolves howling beneath their feet on the bleak winter nights, at 
