their precious gift. Years after they will still stir his
emotions, bring back afresh to his memory echoes of
past enjoyments; and, when he is living the sad, sunless
life of a western city, will put such an ache into
his being, such a home-sickness for beautiful glades
and great towering trees to his heart, and bring
to his mind such vivid impressions of acridscented
wood fires, lush wet grasses, and the
scents of a thousand flowers that, till the picture
is dulled and the feeling numbed by the manifold
bonds and tyrannies of a modern existence, he will be
willing to cast away all hope of material gain, all ambitions,
all petty strivings, and join himself once more to
the life of the forests in order to watch again the
free, fantastic insect life, the floral wealth, and
unfettered, unconfined by walls and streets, to note the
gay processions of the seasons—nature’s varying fetes
in honour of the fullest perfections of the year.
A really exhaustive catalogue of Kashmirian plants
and flowers is badly needed. This is a field for amateurs
as yet but little worked, and though a Gulmerg flora
has been put together, much still remains to be done
by those with eyes and leisure. Many of the hitherto
little-known valleys will probably yield rich rewards
to the energetic searcher, and even when no new
varieties can be added to the world’s flora, it is
sufficiently cheering to be able to aid those who come
after with perhaps less experience and less spare time
by correctly naming, describing, and locating those
plants already known to exist in this world’s garden.
I t is not an easy matter determining whether the finds
are new friends or old under somewhat varying guise,
for the circumstances of their growth are so different
to aught anywhere else, that they strike very different
notes, and are vastly independent in their colouring
and habit; even between the lower and upper parts of
the Gulmerg hills the colour and size of the same flower
varied greatly, the upper height giving a depth to the
tone while diminishing greatly the length of stalk
and richness of foliage. Cruciferae are much influenced
by their surroundings, and so are caryophyllaceoe, and
I gave up any attempts to do more than group them,
while the variety of iris and lilies of the valley will be
sufficient pabulum for the energies of many enthusiastic
botanists for some time to come.
The iris, with their capacity for producing spots,
changing their colour, and developing most fragrant
odours, are very kittle cattle to deal with, and, till a
Michael Foster has time and energy to search through
Kashmir, their nomenclature will remain as uncertain
a quantity as it is now, and the amateur will be driven
to the verge of distraction by efforts to decide conscientiously
whether a plant that has varied his hue and lost
most of his markings can still" be allowed to consider
himself of the same class as a gayer brother who has
elected to remain in closer proximity to water.
In the course of my wood wanderings that afternoon
I collected much—beautiful omithogalums, two or three
daphnes, the tiny gagea lutea, giant crane’s bill, a sheaf
of iris, great heads of the blue Jacob’s ladder, anemones
of four different colours, and varieties of primula,
myosotis, mertensia, and bugloss galore,' small white
labiatae, always dull and forbidding in smell, pretty
yellow geums, Solomon’s seal, -eremurus, late violets,
and the brilliant viola biflora, and very handsome representatives
of pedicularis, pink, mauve, and yellow. But
the real difficulty of the work is not the collecting, it is