the specialities of the Reddish valley, mentioned before as eminently rich in plants of interest, are the bird-cherry, _Prunus Padus_, and that curious fern the _Lunaria_. The first is quite a different thing from the ordinary wild cherry of Mobberley, Peover, Lymm, and the Bollin valley, having long, pendulous clusters of white flowers, like those of the laburnum, and with a smell of honey. It is seen not only as a tree, but sometimes forms part of the hedges. The lunaria grows in the meadows, and is in perfection about the end of May. In August and September the river-banks here are gay also with the fine crimson of the willow-herb, the young shoots of which, along with the flowers, drawn through the half-closed hand, leave behind them a grateful smell of baked apples and cream. The upper portion of the valley, nearer Hyde, was very diligently and successfully explored in 1840-42 by Mr. Joseph Sidebotham, then resident at Apethorne,--a townsman whom we have not more reason to be proud of as a naturalist of the most varied and accurate information, and as one of the most scientific and successful prosecutors of microscopical research, than as a singularly skilful artist in photography, and this without letting the colours grow dry upon the palette from which he has been accustomed to transfer them to coveted drawings. It was Mr. Sidebotham who first drew the attention of Manchester naturalists to the fresh-water algæ of our district, and who principally determined their forms and numbers. He also it was who collected the principal portion known up to 1858 of the local _Diatomaceæ_. During the five or six years he devoted to the botany of Bredbury, Reddish, and the banks of the Tame generally, he added no fewer than twenty-five species to the Manchester Flora, many of them belonging to the difficult genera _Rubus_ and _Carex_. His walks were not often solitary. What a broiling day was that on which we first gathered in the Reddish valley the great white cardamine!--what a sweet forenoon that vernal one when we stood contemplating the thousand anemones! Nature seems to delight again in _upsetting_ everything human! One cannot even bestow a name, but she tries to undermine it. No epithet is more appropriate, as a rule, to this most modest of the anemone race, the wild English one, than its specific name, nemorosa, "inhabiting the groves;"--every reader of classical verse recalls, as the eye glides over the word, the _nemus_ which grew greener wherever Phyllis set her foot in it. Giving her the least chance, see, nevertheless, how the wayward lady to whom we owe everything, laughs alike at ourselves and our nomenclature. We call the flower nemorosa, conclude that all is settled, and straightway, as in that sweet and still forenoon in the Reddish valley (1840), she flings it by handfuls over the sward, and leaves the grove as she then left the Arden woods, without a blossom and without a leaf. Similar curious departure from