We passed numerous parties all loaded in this way, and carrying sacks of sixty to a hundred pounds weight by a plaited cane strap which rests on the forehead. I collected a few roots and bulbs of all the best plants I saw on the return march to Shillong; they were not yet dry enough to send to England, and had to be put in a garden till after the rains, as packing green and growing plants almost always results in their death.
On September 15th we went from Myrung to Maoflong, which is a large village on the other side of Syeng, but we did not stop, and though the day was fine I saw but little on the road to detain me in the way of insects or plants. A pair of lazy white-headed and white-tailed eagles, apparently Haliætus leucomphus, which breeds in Assam, were flying round, and when I got to a small marsh a couple of miles from Maoflong, Clarke’s boy showed me the place where that rare and beautiful plant, Primula Smithiana, in which I was much interested, was found. This splendid plant grows as much as three feet high with whorls of flowers like those of P. japonica, but yellow in colour instead of crimson. All the early attempts to introduce it to Europe by means of seed failed, but in 1881 Gammie’s native collector brought a packet with many other seeds from the mountains of Western Bhutan. These I distributed among some of the best gardens in Europe, but only one plant was raised by the late Mr. Anderson Henry of Edin¬ burgh, who sent it when in flower to Sir J. Hooker at Kew. It produced a numerous progeny of seedlings for which, I believe, a large sum was paid. It did not, however, prove very easy to grow in Europe, and I now saw that the plant was semi-aquatic, at least during some part of the year, as the marsh in which it was growing, though dry during the winter, was then very wet, and the long fleshy roots were growing in black mud and sometimes quite under water. The flowering season is in April and May.
Now here is a good illustration of the difficulty of agreement between botanists of the highest repute and experience in dealing with the nomen¬ clature of allied plants having a wide geographical distribution. For the histopr' of this Primula is as follows. Wallich had described Primula prolifera from the Khasia hills. Then Junghuhn had described Primula imperialis from Java, where it was found growing on volcanoes at 9,000 to 10,000 feet. In 1882 Hooker in the Flora of British India united the Khasia and Java plants as one species, P. prolifera. Two years later, m the Botanical Magazine, plate 6732, Hooker figured the plant raised by Anderson Henry from my seed as P. prolifera. He himself had gathered it years before m Sikkim, though he had not recognised it by that name, twenty years after, Craib described a plant which he had collected as Primula Smithiana. He noted that it differed conspicuously from P. prolifera in having a dense coating of yellow meal over the inflorescence and the flowers. Finally in 1914, Professor Bayley Balfour found that my Primula was, after all, identical with Craib’s and not with P. prolifera. "It should be, I think," he wrote, "a good garden plant of the Candelabra section and, if Hooker had only recognised it, might have borne your name instead of the perhaps more beautiful but certainly more difficult Primula associated with it."However, so far as I know, the plant soon died out in cultivation here, as many of these Asiatic Alpine plants do. When Trinominalism comes to be a practice accepted by botanists as it has been by ornithologists—as I think it must be eventually—here is a case in point.
