QUERIES IN LOCAL TOPOGRAPHICAL BOTANY. 267 
part of the wood near Calstock Church, a neighbourhood in which 
I have myself seen it; the last time so recently as 1880. In 
1868 the writer of an article in Journal of Royal Institution of 
Cornwall (vol. iii. 49-51) stated that it abounds in every bushy 
field in a direct line between Halton Quay on the Tamar and New- 
ton Ferrers on the Lynher (Notter). His attention, he tells us, was 
first called to the plant by Mr. Kempthorne, of Callington, who 
found it growing in a field near Newton Ferrers. It still grows in 
considerable quantity in certain parts of the tract named, and I 
have also met with it below Hingston Down on the south, and in a 
spot about a mile from Callington. In 1868 I discovered it in two 
spots near Maristow, some miles within the Devon border; but 
since that time cultivation of the surface has much reduced the 
quantity of the plant in the locality, though I noticed it existing 
there so recently as 1877. With the records before us, a glance at 
a map of Devon and Cornwall will show that its range, as hitherto 
ascertained, extends from the neighbourhood of Bodmin to Car- 
dynham and Bradoc on the east ; and again from the eastern part 
of Quethiock to the Devon side of the Tamar near Gunnislake, and 
to Calstock and Halton on the other side below ; with, to use a 
geological phrase, two outlying patches near Maristow. Notwith- 
standing the great interest belonging to this species, its range in 
Cornwall is not as yet exactly ascertained, and a local botanist 
would do good work in fully tracing it out. The statements of its 
localities in our standard British Floras are mostly inexact and 
misleading. Those of Bentham's are the most correct : "In a few 
very limited localities in Cornwall and Devonshire." Hooker's, in 
Student's Flora, are far less so : "Thickets, Tavistock; Bodmin, on 
m the Priory lands." Babington has under it, "Devon and Cornwall, 
rare." Boswell, in English Botany, " About Bodmin, in Cornwall, 
and near Tavistock, Devon," with the additional statements that he 
had had ripe seed of the plant of me from "near Calstock." 
No facts within our knowledge suffice to explain the very limited 
and peculiar distribution of this species. It is now generally 
identified with a Continental plant, formerly thought by some to be 
distinct. These persons consequently had to face the conclusion of 
the Physospermum being limited in the whole world to Cornwall. 
This would be unlike any other phanerogamous species, of which 
there is no undoubted one peculiar even to the United Kingdom. 
The real facts concerning its distribution are sufficiently striking ; 
