206 On the Species of the Genus Primula in Essex.
wood. In their leaves, the wide inflation of the calyx, the
yellow colour of their petals, and the fairly well-defined eye-
spot, they seemed to be intermediate hybrids, but they were
flowering very feebly. In the second instance the plant was
a large, healthy, free-flowering one, which in its nature
evidently took most after the Cowslip, as might be expected
from its growing on a hedge-bank. The flowers were too
large and faintly-coloured for a pure Cowslip, and as I saw
no Primroses within miles, but abundance of Oxlips in
Wethersfield Wood about 100 yards off, I concluded it was a
cross between them. Presuming this surmise to be correct,
the facts I have brought forward show that all our three
common Essex species will hybridize the one with the
other.64
Numerous insects appear to visit the Oxlip. I have observed
no less than eight or ten species in the act of doing so, but it is on
bees that the plant relies mainly for its fertilization. Antho-
phora acervorum is the bee which oftenest visits the flowers.
The honey-bee, and a large striped humble-bee (Bombus
scrimshiranus, Kirby) are also very frequent visitors. I have
also seen Bombus muscorum, Latr., at work, and several other
species of Bombus. I have sometimes observed in the flowers
the small beetle, Meligethes picipes, previously described; and
on one occasion a specimen of the Brimstone butterfly was
a visitor. Not unfrequently a dipterous insect was seen,
its long proboscis and hovering flight apparently enabling
54 On this subject Mr. Baker writes me:—"I suspect that all the nu-
merous named Primulas of this section are mere varieties of our three
species, and I have no doubt they all hybridize naturally with one
another." He thinks that the following are all probably mere varieties
of P. elatior:—P. palloni, Lehm.; P. montana, Opitz.; P. perrciniana,
Flugge ; P. fluggeana, Lehm.; P. intricata, Gren.; P. carpathica, Fuss.;
P. alpestris, Schur.; and P. subarctica, Schur.
While this sheet was passing through the press I saw, in the garden of
Mr. J. H. Tuke, of Hitchin, a plant of P. elatior bearing light-red flowers.
It was growing near a number of plants brought many years ago from
Saffron Walden; but whether it had been induced by cultivation to
produce its red flowers, or whether it was a hybrid seedling which had
inherited them from a coloured Polyanthus or Primrose parent, I cannot
say.