170 
REPORT OP MEETINGS 
Professor of Botany at Oxford, accompanied by Dr. Brewer, 
made a two months’ journey through the West of England and 
Wales in search of plants, visiting the Mendips, Cheddar, Uphill 
and “ Brent ” [Brean] Down. In the still extant description of 
this journey written by Dillenius he notes the discovery at 
Uphill and Brean Down of a new grass which he calls “ Spartium 
montanu7n radice hulhosa et fungosa’^ Later, he identified it by 
means of A. Scheuchzer’s description in the AgrostograpJiia, 
published in 1716, with the species therein named “ Gramen 
valesianum tenuifolium, panicula spicata, viride argentea, splen- 
dente.’^ This identification by Dillenius was correct, and testifies 
to his skill in diagnosis as much as his detection of the growing 
plant does to his keenness as a field-botanist. However, the 
specimens he gathered somehow became separated from his label 
and memorandum, and so remained unremarked in the Sherardian 
Herbarium for close upon two centuries. Meanwhile nearly every 
British botanist of note, generation after generation, came to 
Brean Down for its rare plants and heeded not this Koeleria 
growing abundantly about the rocks. Although the facilities we 
possess for botanical exploration are so great in comparison with 
those at the command of our forefathers, and the advances of 
science have been so prodigious since the days of Ray and 
Dillenius, yet it must be owned that in critical acumen and 
intellectual vigour the people of to-day can claim no superiority 
over those who laid the foundations of our knowledge. It was 
not until 1904 that Mr. G. Claridge Druce, of Oxford, when 
preparing a memoir of Dillenius and an account of his herbarium, 
looked through a packet of odds and ends, saw the unlabelled 
specimens in one place and the empty sheet with memo, in 
another, surmised that they were related to each other, and 
fitted them together again. Mr. Druce now wanted proof that 
he was right in so doing ; and, although in October, the next 
week-end found him on the way to Weston. Without much 
difficulty he succeeded in finding the plant with dried flower- 
stems growing in considerable quantity on exposed limestone 
slopes. Thus all doubt of the existence in Britain of K. vallesiaca 
