Note 128 — {41} Fifthly, Of Plants.

Gerard, em., p. 535,—Salicornia herbacea, L. But Linnæus referred one of Clayton’s Virginia specimens (the rest he did not distinguish from S. herbacea) to a variety, β. Virginica (which he took to be also European; Sp. Pl.), and afterwards raised this to a species, as S. Virginica, Syst. Nat., vol. ii. p. 52, Willd. Sp. Pl., vol. i. p. 25. To this the more common glasswort of our salt marshes is to be referred; and we possess, beside, a still better representative of the European plant in S. mucronata, Bigel. (Fl. Bost., edit. 2, p. 2), which may perhaps best be taken for a peculiar variety (S. herbacea, β. mucronata, articulorum dentibus squamisque mucronatis, Enum. Pl. Cantab., Ms.; and S. Virginica may well be another) of a species common to us and Europe. It is certain that we have plants strictly common to American and European Floras, in which the differences referable to difference of atmospheric and other like conditions are either not apparent or of no account; and it is possible that there are yet other species, now considered peculiar to America, which only differ from older European species in those characters—whether of exuberance mostly, or also of impoverishment—in which an American variety of a plant, common to America and Europe, might beforehand be expected to differ from an European state of the same. “Linnæus ut Tournefortii errores corrigeret, varietates nimis contraxit.”—Link, Phil. Bot., p. 222.