places. The late Mr. T. F. Forster, after whom Sir J. E.
Smith adopted it as a species, found it at Hastings and near
Tonbridge; and Mr. Grubb has gathered it at Walton,
Essex. In Scotland it has been found near Forfar, by the
late Mr. Don ; at Ratho, by Mr. Maughan; and at Hopeton
Park, near Edinburgh, by Mr. Christy.
Mr. Maughan’s specimens, now before us, have the leaves
much narrower than they are in the individual here figured,
some of them even between linear and setaceous; whilst
other plants, especially cultivated ones from Hungarian
seeds, and wild ones from Switzerland, are furnished with
leaves which more nearly approach those of the common
L . corniculatus, t. 2090, with which many botanists have,
perhaps justly, united it. We can see no marks of distinction
in the flowers or fruit, nor, indeed, any but those
afforded by the more branched and straggling habit of the
plant and the slenderness, or narrowness, of all its parts.
The umbels are usually of fewer flowers. Professor Fries
finds it in Scania, with L . corniculatus and L . major of Smith,
#.2091, and observes that the three grow intermixed, “sine
transitu;” yet he speaks of them as but varieties. Mr. Borrer,
who is more inclined to regard L . tenuis as distinct from
L . corniculatus, admits that the flowers present no sufficient
distinction; the claw of the vexillum being gibbous, as in
that, from a transverse inflation at its upper part, not merely
arched longitudinally as in L . major, and the calyx having
neither the difference of shape nor the teeth divergent before
flowering, which, with some less important differences,
distinguish, satisfactorily as he thinks, the plant last mentioned.
These characters in the vexillum and calyx tvere
first pointed out. by the Rev. Dr. Beeke, Dean of Bristol,
who well explains t iem in a note in Turner and Dillwyn’s
Botanist's Guide, p. 528, where the name of L . gibbus is
proposed for L . corniculatus, and that of L.pilosus for L . major.
The plant now before us he pronounces a variety of
the former species.—W. J. H. and W. B.