Page:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 12.djvu/47

Rh the description is accompanied with a figure. It will facilitate our inquiries if we examine each of these species separately, beginning with

There is less difficulty in identifying this species and tracing its synonyms than in either of the other two. Linnæus, misled by the uncharacteristic and formal figure of Dillenius in Ray's Synopsis, t. xix. f. 2. has made two varieties of it, β and δ; and Hudson is the first author, adopting the Linnean system, who made it distinct under the name of purpurca. He, however, united it again with militaris in the second edition of his Flora. Jacquin clearly defined the plant; and his opinion was followed by Murray, Hoffman, Roth, Willdenow, Swartz, and most of the continental botanists. Curtis also has well distinguished it in his Flora Londinensis. Withering, in the second edition of his Arrangement, has made it a variety, but says he had not seen it. Sir James Smith in his excellent Flora Britannica has done the same, but has followed Linnæus too closely; and, if his synonyms be correct, has included three English species, and we believe a foreign one, in his ''militaris: O. tephrosanthos, O. militaris, Eng. Bot. vol.'' xxvii. t. 1873, O. variegata (the fig. 22, 23, and 24, of Vaillant being this plant), and O. fusca. The error in the first volume of English Botany, where fusca is called militaris, is corrected in a later volume, to which we have referred; and another plant is admitted, though unwillingly, as the α intended by Linnæus.

The earliest notice we have of this as an English plant is to be found in Gerard, p. 166; where he informs us that it grows in many places in Kent with the Bee and the Fly Satyrions, and among the rest "upon the hills adjoining to a village named Greenhithe," the very place referred to by James Sherard in Dillenius's Ray, and where it is frequently found at present. This Rh