THE PRESERVATION OF OUR FLORA 185 
Monorchis as the site for his country house on the North Downs. 
But if such causes of loss, which may be only local or may 
prove to be national, are inevitable in our over-peopled country, 
others most certainly are not so. 
A recent measure for decentralising our local government 
seems to have created the necessity for some means of expending 
rates. The lighting of our country lanes by gas may be 
desirable ; but I fail to see the necessity for the replacement 
of the turf- edging of our footpaths by stone or cement copings, 
the destruction of many a roadside strip of grass and flowers 
where the width of the roadway exceeds the requirements of 
traffic, and the wholesale plastering over of our hedgebanks 
with the mud laboriously excavated from our now formalised 
roadside ditches. All this, no doubt, provides employment 
and raises the rates, it may not have exterminated many 
species, but it is destroying the entire beauty of our country 
roads. 
In 1882 the late Professor Paley published a long and 
interesting list of the flowering plants then found by him on 
Barnes Common. Barnes Common is still an open space, 
protected by a body of conservators from all depredators but 
golf-players, but I very much doubt if Tetsdalia nudicaulis 
and some others among the species found by Paley in 1882 
can be found there now. The Common is surrounded by 
houses and railways and traversed by well-drained roads, and 
it is exposed to an ever-increasing volume of smoke from 
Putney, Hammersmith, and the rest of London. Some years 
ago Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace expressed to me the fear 
that London smoke was killing the junipers on the Surrey 
hills as it has already all but demolished the lichen-flora 
both of Epping Forest and of Kew Gardens. This destructive 
agency could at least be checked if even existing legislation were 
enforced. 
We must all rejoice in the vastly-increased appreciation of 
the beauties of the plant world b}' those “ in populous city pent,” 
and in the well-meant, but often misdirected, efforts of the 
suburban amateur gardener. These have, however, created a 
demand which has had, and is having, truly deplorable results. 
The beautiful sea-holly, loosely rooted on our sandy or shingly 
shores, has been torn up wholesale by the roots to satisfy the 
artistic tastes of the London street buyer, and has now 
disappeared from several of its former localities. As Darwin’s 
work on “ Insectivorous Plants ” caused Drosera rotundifolia to 
be for a short time offered for sale in the streets of the City ; so 
it may have been his work on orchids that spurred the suburban 
gardener to the ambitious, but almost certainly futile, effort to 
cultivate our native representatives of that remarkable group. 
Even at Kew these species constantly die out and require to be 
renewed. Fortunately a wide-spread idea that orchids must 
have spotted leaves may have protected many of our rarer 
