December 21, 1372.] THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
4S5 
catalogued, although they contain specimens in both 
branches of Natural History singularly rare and sought 
alter, and though more than one zoologist or botanist of 
note gazes on them daily from the windows of his home. 
A paper whose conditions are that it should be light and 
popular, and that it should not exceed ten minutes in 
the delivery, cannot throw much scientific light upon the 
plants of the most limited region; but it may reveal 
sources of enjoyment and raise individual enthusiasm, 
and it may remind this meeting that the time has 
possibly come, when our association should use the means 
at its command to encourage the gradual creation of such 
a fiora and fauna of the county as no single naturalist, 
unassisted by a public body, can in any case trustworthily 
compile. 
In this beautiful valley, fat with the rich red soil that 
countless millennia have seen washed down from the 
surrounding hills, the flora is everywhere so unusually 
rich as to win the envy and delight of strangers. It has 
been my lot to pilot botanists from all parts of England 
in search of local rarities ; and I have found their chief 
raptures given not to the uncommon flower they had 
come to see, but to the profusion of form and colour 
which includes almost every English genus; manifest 
in the common turnpike roads which skirt the hills, but 
revealed in full perfection to those only who penetrate 
the interior of the range. In the sheltered lanes of the 
less wooded combes; in the road from Kilveto Parson’s 
farm, the footpath from the Castle of Comfort to Over 
Stowey, above all in the lane from the Bell inn to 
Aisholt, the hedge-banks and the wide ‘grass margins of 
ihe road, are scarcely surpassed in beauty by the mosaic 
of a Swiss meadow or an Alpine slope. From the be¬ 
ginning to the end of June the colours are blue and 
yellow; the blue represented by the ground ivy, the 
germander speedwell, the brooklime, the late bugle and! 
the early self-heal, the narrow-leaved flax, the long 
spikes of milkwort, and the varieties of the violet; the 
yellow by the birdsfoot trefoil large and small, the St. 
John’s-wort, golden mugweed, and hop trefoil, the agri¬ 
mony, the yellow vetchling, and the countless kinds of 
hawkweed. In the hedges above are the mealtree and 
guelder rose, the madder, white campion and lady’s 
bedstraw, half hidden by the twining tendrils, white 
blossoms, and tiny cucumbers of the bryony; while 
here and there, where the hedge gives way to an old 
stone pit or deserted quarry, the tall foxglove and the 
great yellow mullein stand up, harmonious sisters, to fill 
the gap. By the middle of July the colours shift. The 
flora of early spring is gone : the milkwort shows its 
pods,, trie speedwell its bushy leaves; the yellow still 
remains; but the blue has given way to pink; to the 
lovely musk mallow, the horehound, doves’ foot, cranes- 
bill, restharrow, painted cup, and ealaminth. With 
August a third change arrives ; the small short cluster¬ 
ing flowers are gone: instead of them we have the 
coarse straggling fleabanes, ragworts, and woodsage: 
the great blue trusses of the tufted vetch and the pure 
white trumpets of the bindweed take possession of the 
hedges ; the yellow sagittate leaves of the black bryony 
and. the red berries of the mountain ash warn us that 
summer is past. Our September visit marks the closing 
scene. The flowers are few and far between; but the 
ivy bloom is musical with bees, the hazels put forth clus¬ 
ters ruddy bro wn as those with which the satyr wooed the 
raithtul Shepherdess; the arum pushes its poisonous 
scarlet fruit between the mats of dying grass ; and the 
meadows which slope upwards from the brooks are blue 
with the flowers of the colchicum. 
. Tliese are a1 ; 1 common flowers, whose names and ha- 
bits, ii education did tier work, we should learn in child- 
hood from our mother and our nurse: it is their im¬ 
mense profusion, not their rarity, that calls for notice ; 
and they represent but a small part of the hill flora. To 
exhaust this fairly we must visit four different regions— 
the hill tops, the bogs, the_ coppices, and the slopes to¬ 
ward the sea. Of the first it is difficult to speak without 
a rapturous digression as their familiar sights and sounds 
occur to us—the breeze that seems half conscious of the joy 
it brings, the musical hum of the bees, the warble of in¬ 
visible larks, the popping of the dry furze pods in the 
stillness, the quivering air above the heather, the startled 
spiders with their appended egg-bags, the grasshoppers, 
the green hair streaks, the gem-like tigerbeetles on the 
wing, in the distance the Mendips and the yellow sea, 
or the long rich valley, closed by Dunkery and Minehead. 
Heath, furze, bracken, and whortle berries, are the 
four tetrarchs of the hill tops, giving endless shades of 
red, and green, and yellow The heaths are three, and 
only three—the heather, the cross-leaved heath, and the 
bottle heath, the last exhibiting rarely a white variety, 
which in the language of flowers tells the tenderest of 
tales. From beneath their shelter peep the eyebright, 
the spring potentil, the heath bedstraw, and the creeping 
St. John’s-wort; amidst them springs the uncommon 
bristly bent grass; everywhere the green paths which 
wind amongst them are carpeted with the moenchia and 
the little breakstone, and bordered by the red and yellow 
sheep’s sorrel and the pale yellow mouse-ear. On many 
of the prickly furze beds grows the wiry leafless dodder ; 
every ditch is filled with masses of lemon-scented oreo- 
pteris, and every patch of stones is hidden by the pink 
blossoms of the mountain stonecrop. At 800 feet above 
the sea we meet with mat grass and the cross-leaved 
heath.. Higher still we find the slender deers’ hair, first 
cousin to the isolepis of our greenhouses; and highest of 
all grow, for those who know their haunt, two species 
of the stag’s horn club moss. 
The bogs are very numerous. They form the summits 
of the combes; and some of them descend the hill until 
they join a deep cut stream. All are covered with the 
turquoise bloom of the forget-me-not and the glossy 
peltate leaves of the marsh pennywort, and choked with 
the little water-blinks. They all include liverwort with 
its umbrella-shape fructification, sphagnum, marshwort, 
and pearlwort; and on their margins grow the ivv- 
leaved hair-bell, the lesser spearwort, the lousewort, and 
the bog pimpernel. In a few of them are found the ob¬ 
long pond weed and the marsh St. John’s-wort; in two 
combe3 only, as far as I know, grows, alone of its genus, 
the round-leaved sundew. 
Of the coppices, Cockercombe and Seven Wells are the 
best known ; but their large tree3 check the growth of 
flowers ; and the botanist will find more to please him 
in Butterfly Combe andHolford Glen, which are smaller 
and less frequented. Here in early spring masses of 
the white wild hyacinth rise amidst last year’s dead 
leaves ; here grow the cowwheat, woodrush, golden rod, 
sheep’s scabious, wood pimpernel, wild raspberry, 
sanicle, and twayblade. The helleborine is found in 
Crowcombe; in Tetton woods the rare pink lily of the 
valley ; in Gothelstone the adders’ tongue and mountain 
speedwell; in Ashleigh Combe, thelypteris ; in Aisholt 
wood the white foxglove, white herb Robert, and white 
prunella; while under the famous hollies of Alfoxden, 
sacred to the memory of “ Peter Bell” and “We are 
Seven,” grow the graceful millet grass and a rare variety 
of the bramble. 
On the St. Audric3 slope the changed soil and the in¬ 
fluence of the sea give birth to several new plants. The 
autumn gentian, the tufted centaury, the round-headed 
garlic, and the sea starwort are abundant near the cliffs ; 
the perfoliate yellow wort is common ; fluellen grows 
in the stubbles, the lady’s tresses near the lime-kiln, the 
sea pimpernel between the stones, the arrow-grass and 
hard-grass j ust above the sea, to which we descend be¬ 
tween banks covered, as no other banks are covered, by 
the magnificent large flowered tutsan. 
A few rare plants remain, which come under neither 
of the groups described. The Cornish money-wort 
abounds in a small, nameless combe near Qnantocks- 
head ; the rare white stonecrop is indigenous or natu¬ 
ralized at Over Stowey ; the white climbing corydalis is 
found close to Mr. Esdaile’s lodge; the lady’s mantle. 
