The Phytologist (Volume 2, PT. 1); A Popular Botanical Miscellany (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Goodyera repens Cypripedium Calceolus Iris pumila CepbalantLera ruhra Allium flavum Veratrum Lobelianum Perhaps for some of them the botanist will find it expedient to stop a day or two also at Baden. (To be continued). On the re-discovery of Rays Habitat for Malaxis paludosa at Tonbridge Wells. By John Sharp, Esq. Tonbridge Wells, September 10, 1844. Dear Sir, It is with feelings of no ordinary kind that I communicate to you the rediscovery of'a plant supposed by many to be lost (if indeed it were ever found) in the neighbourhood of Tonbridge Wells. Last August, as Mr. Woodward and myself rambled in the woods near Bridge rocks, till we came out of the grounds into a kind of grassy bog. Mr. Woodward, feeling fatigued by the excessive heat of the day, threw himself on a dry part, and remarked in a casual manner that Neottia spiralis grew there. As I was botanizing but a few yards off, I ran to him, and seeing the plant, shouted with a voice of rapture that it was Malaxis paludosa ! To an ardent admiration of Nature I have always added a great respect for those original minds who first gave to her beauties a systematic form. Foremost amongst these is Ray, a philosopher who lived at a period, certainly not of ignorance, yet still one in which the grossest absurdities were sent forth by men who were called scientific, who built their theories in their closets to account for phenomena which they never witnessed, and drew inductions from data which existed only in their imaginations. Although perhaps not wholly untouched by the speculative manner of the day, Hay became, in the pursuit of Natural History, a plain chronicler of facts, and faithfully recorded what he witnessed, and no more; thus rendering to science a far more important service than all those dreame...