Of game and other sport-yielding birds, the red grouse breeds in the Mainland, Rousay, Eday, Hoy, Walls, Flotta and Fara. Grouse disease is unknown in Orkney, and the birds of Walls and Rousay are the heaviest in Scotland. Various attempts to acclimatise the black grouse, partridge, red-legged partridge, and pheasant have all practically failed. The ptarmigan bred in Hoy until 1831. Pallas’s sand grouse at times visit the Islands in considerable numbers, and are surmised to have bred in several islands. The quail comes in much the same way, if in fewer numbers, and has nested, though rarely. The plant-life of the Islands, however interesting to the scientifically-equipped botanist, presents no such happy hunting-ground to the unsophisticated lover of wild nature as does their bird-life. The practical non-existence of woods conspires with the cool summer and high winds of the country to restrict both the number and the distribution of its flora. Ferns in particular are of circumscribed distribution, a loss to the beauty of the country-side only less conspicuous than that caused by the absence of woods; while several other popular and showy plants, such as the wild rose, the foxglove, gorse, and broom are of only too limited a range. Some 20 species or varieties of ferns are known or reported, of which _ophioglossum vulgatum, var. ambiguum_, was for years unknown out of the Islands. _Zannichellia polycarpa_, a pond-weed, was for some time known as a British plant only from the Loch of Kirbuster in Orphir; and _Carex fulva_, a sedge, was at one period peculiar to the same parish. More interesting, however, is the recent discovery by Mr Magnus Spence, who has lately published the first complete _Flora orcadensis_, of a plant which Mr C. E. Moss, D. Sc., of Cambridge, considers to be either a new variety of the dainty _Primula scotica_, or _Primula stricta_, a species hitherto unknown to the flora of the British Isles. The common variety of _Primula scotica_ is fairly abundant in many of the islands. Hoy is the most interesting of the islands from a botanical point of view, as it contains a variety of plants unknown to the others. Perhaps the most interesting of these is _Loiseleuria procumbens_, the trailing azalea, which makes a beautiful show in its season on several spots among the higher hills. This island also contains in several of its more sheltered glens practically the only indigenous trees that Orkney can boast of, consisting of somewhat stunted specimens of hazel, birch, mountain ash, quaking poplar, and honeysuckle. Before the days of the Baltic timber trade the dying Orcadian must have been gravely concerned over the disposition of the family porridge-stick, or “pot-tree,” as it was locally styled. Even to-day, with some plantations around certain mansion-houses, it is doubtful whether all the trees in the county, indigenous and introduced, would cover a sixty-acre field. We subjoin a