THE BASTARD TOAD-FLAX— continued. 
once. In wet weather, or if artificially moistened, they close. The one-seeded nut 
is ribbed externally, or rather the adherent persistent perianth-tube is so. 
Our one British species, T. humifusum De Candolle, was included in Limit’s 
T. linophyllum , so-called from its Flax-like leaves ; and among earlier botanists it was 
known as Linaria adulterina , which has been translated by the book-name Bastard 
Toad-flax. Readily overlooked and not used in popular medicine, the plant cannot 
be said to have any real popular name. Unknown in Eastern or Northern Europe, 
it is also absent from Scotland and Ireland, being found, in fact, no farther north 
than Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. It grows in hilly pastures on chalk or oolitic 
limestone, in dry, sunny spots, and attaches itself to various plants. 
It has a yellow, woody rhizome, the fibrous roots proceeding from which put 
forth little white knob-like haustoria or suckers. The aerial stems are numerous, 
and, as the name humifusum (given by the elder De Candolle in his “Flore Fran^aise ” 
in 1815) indicates, they are prostrate, spreading out in a circle, and reaching six to 
eighteen inches in length. They are angular and are clothed with numerous slender, 
one-veined, linear leaves, about an inch long. The edges of the upper leaves, the 
bracts, and the pedicels are rough with minute denticulations. The flowers, which 
appear from May to July, are about one-sixth of an inch in diameter, and, though 
often solitary, are sometimes in cymose groups of three. The funnel-shaped 
perianth-tube is very short, and the triangular lobes of the limb have each a pair of 
minute teeth at their bases. They are green externally and white within. The 
green, ovoid fruit is longer than the persistent perianth, the segments of which are, 
at this stage, rolled inwards. 
The Bastard Toad-flax was first recorded as a British plant by an excellent but 
little-known botanist of the beginning of the seventeenth century, John Goodyer, 
who lived in the neighbourhood of Petersfield, and seems to have been one of the 
first really critical students of species in England. He published no independent 
work, most of his observations appearing — as does the finding of the Bastard Toad- 
flax — in Thomas Johnson’s edition of Gerard’s “ Herball,” published in 1633. 
