HEDGE-ROWS OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF PLYMOUTH. 217 
Remembering that a pear tree growing near Antony produced 
some flowers last spring, I went recently to look for fruit. On 
arriving at the spot I was vexed to find none on it, though the 
broken state of its branches and the condition of the hedge-bank 
below told a tale, namely, that others besides botanists have a taste 
for wild pears; the rough way in which they had been gathered 
leading to the conclusion that they had been taken for some other 
purpose than to afford diagnosis between Pyraster and Achras. 
The chance of yet finding a fallen fruit led me to search amongst 
the surrounding herbage, but here a field mouse had forestalled me, 
though the rodent, more considerate for science than the biped pear- 
devourer, had left me nearly the half of a fruit, just sufficient to 
enable me to ascertain its size, and also to show the tree producing 
it to be Pyraster rather than Achras. The fruit was 141 inch in 
length, by 145 inch in breadth; of a size greatly in excess of its 
ally Briggsii, the Pear I next have to speak of. This peculiar Pear 
I discovered several years ago in a hedge in the parish of Egg 
Buckland, where there are many bushes of it. I sent specimens 
to the Botanical Exchange Club, from which Dr. Boswell (then 
Mr. Boswell-Syme) drew up a description of the plant for the 
Report of the Society for 1871, giving it at the same time the 
provisional name of Lriggsiz. To this I subsequently added par- 
ticulars in the Journal of Botany, with reference to some of the 
striking characteristics of the plant. 
I will now give some particulars as to Dr. Phené’s conjectures 
concerning this Pear. Though aware when I wrote mine of the 
botanical interest attaching to the plant, I certainly did not expect 
this little Pear would subsequently be brought forward by a dis- 
tinguished archeologist to support some ingenious speculations of 
his own. That it should be considered an interpreter of an old 
legend connected with our great western hero, King Arthur, and, 
moreover, that its distribution should be held to indicate the migra- 
tions of an ancient people, would have then seemed almost beyond 
the verge of possibility. That such has now been the case proves 
how the student of a certain science may sometimes, quite uncon- 
sciously to himself, help forward the work of another whose 
investigations seem to lie in quite a different direction. 
In the Gardener’s Chronicle for November 27th, 1875, a reference 
to it appeared, and in the Journal of Botany for August, 1876, 
Dr. Maxwell Masters, the editor of the Gardener’s Chronicle, em- 
