enumerates about 380 plants seen growing in the neighbourhood of Great Marlow. This indeed forms the basis of the county flora, but it must be borne in mind that a considerable number are from Berkshire localities. Shortly afterwards Dr. Ayres of Thame issued Exsiccati of plants found growing in the neighbourhood of Thame in north Buckinghamshire, and in these Oxfordshire localities are also represented. Notes on the flora of the neighbourhood of Stoke Poges were contributed to the Phytologist by Mr. (now Sir) W. Thiselton Dyer; Messrs. W. Pamplin, C. J. Ashfield and S. Beisley also added some county references in the same journal. Buckinghamshire specimens collected by Edward Forster, jun., Mrs. Robinson, Mr. T. Cox, J. Forbes Young and Samuel Rudge are in the British Museum herbarium, and others obtained by Mr. W. Wilson Saunders and by Mrs. Lightfoot of Wootton in Northamptonshire are in the Fielding herbarium at Oxford. Elizabeth Chandler of High Wycombe prepared a herbarium about 1864-5 of plants from that vicinity, which is now in the British Museum, and it filled up many gaps in the records of common species; and she also published notes in the Botanical Chronicle for 1864. In the pages of The Quarterly Magazine of the High Wycombe Natural History Society Mr. James Britten contributed the result of such records as had been already made by other writers, as well as his own discoveries.
MYCETOZOA[1]
Of the numerous organisms that form connecting links between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms, those that are known as Mycetozoa [2] are remarkable alike for their variety and beauty, and also for the strange metamorphoses through which they pass, in completing their life cycle. It has been customary in scientific classification to place the Mycetozoa with the Fungi, but as the former differ from the latter in several essential features, particularly in the power of locomotion which they exhibit in certain stages of their existence, it has been proposed by a German systematist to rank them as a separate kingdom.
The investigations that have been carried on in Buckinghamshire, although over a somewhat limited area, are sufficient to show that the county is rich in these organisms. In this respect it agrees with the adjoining counties of Herts and Beds, the district under consideration containing either an unusual abundance of Mycetozoa, or else that the neighbourhood has been carefully searched for them. Taking the three counties just mentioned, there have been recorded ninety-nine species out of the one hundred and forty catalogued for Great Britain, the number of species for the whole world being two hundred and two.
Nearly all the Bucks records are founded on gatherings made in the eastern portion of the county, chiefly in the parishes of Dagnall, Ivinghoe and Little Brickhill. The most prolific locality is Ward's Coombe Wood, where the conditions are particularly favourable to the growth of these organisms. The wood has a northerly aspect, is cool and moist, and the trees are allowed to grow naturally. Those that fall, through age or by storms, are left to gradual decay, and these, especially the beeches, when in an advanced stage of disintegration, sustain great numbers of the Mycetozoa, often several genera being present on one
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