86 
NATURE NOTES. 
one English habitat, the long reach of sandy ground called 
“ the Warren ” near Dawlish. There I searched for it long and 
vainly (for it was a fortnight before it opens its little delicate 
blooms), till my attention was directed to one little plant of it, 
and I at once learned to distinguish its little straggling rosette 
of thread-like leaves from the surrounding short grass ; and then 
I saw that it was to be found in scores and hundreds over a 
considerable area. Is it credible that it was brought here in 
ballast and shot somewhere at the mouth of the Exe, and so 
naturalized ? I for one find it difficult, nay, impossible, to be 
satisfied with such a theory. 
Or how shall we account for the presence of Astrantia major 
in two large patches at the top of a wooded hill above Stokesay 
in Shropshire as its one British habitat ? I was taken, through 
the kindness of Mr. Latouche, the vicar, an excellent naturalist,, 
to visit the spot this summer, and found it in full bloom — a very 
different-looking flower from the Astrantia major of cultivation 
and of the Swiss Alps, though probably undistinguishable by 
any permanent or reliable characters. It was growing in great 
luxuriance. Here, too, I find it impossible to accept my guide’s 
theory that it may have been introduced as a potherb by the 
Romans, who had a villa somewhere in the near neighbourhood,, 
on the line of one of their ancient roads. It remains to be 
shown that the Astrantia is, or was, a potherb. The mere fact 
of its being an umbellate plant is no sufficient presumption of 
this ; and the explanation bears a suspicious resemblance to the 
attempts to connect the Helix Pomatia with Roman gastronomy. 
One more puzzle. How comes the Maianthemum bifolinm or 
Smilacina bifolia to have established itself in the copious abund- 
ance in which it is to be found associated with Tnentalis europcea 
(a rare plant in England) at the head of Forge Valley, near 
Hackness. The slope at the top of which it grows faces full 
down that branch of the Derwent which there runs straight for 
the North Sea. Can this have been the funnel through which 
the plant was somehow transported from the continent of 
Europe ? Most unlikely ; its seed is a berry, not a substance 
that could be blown, though it might have drifted. At any rate, 
there it is in abundance, and a sweet little flower it is, though it 
should be called (/biKeanthemum not il/azanthemum, to the mis- 
leading of itinerant botanists. This plant is reported in the 
botanical books to be an inhabitant of Lancashire, though I 
have never verified the habitats given, and a friend of mine, 
(one of my Lawers companions), assures me he has seen it in 
abundance in a wood at Weston-super-Mare. It is, however, a 
well-known sub-Alpine denizen of Central Europe. 
And here I must end my catalogue, for I purposely confined 
myself at the outset to plants that I had visited in their own. 
homes ; or I might ask why is Lobelia urens to be found only near 
Axminster; the Rcemeria hybrida between Swaffham and Burwell 
(I have had the exact locality described by an old friend who- 
