Over the past few years, Sue and I have been working on the bryophyte collection of Henry Guermonprez (1858-1924) from Portsmouth Museum. It is a small collection of over 320 gatherings, originally assembled by Harold Monington (1867-1924) as a set of species from the Bognor area for his friend Guermonprez, presumably to help start the latter recording this group of small plants. Guermonprez and his sister then added to it, especially in 1898, though were still occasionally adding plants up to 1922.
It turns out that the collection is effectively one of mosses; there are no liverworts or hornworts within the bound and bundled fascicles. The latter are organised according to The Student’s Handbook of British Mosses (Dixon & Jameson 1896), and an additional folder contains many loose and varied specimens, including some from Derbyshire, Scotland, New Zealand and Brazil.
Among this rag-bag of un-sorted material are two small liverworts. They are each mounted on small portions of black card, which is then glued to a pencil drawing of the plant. Both are labelled “Longdown”, and one helpfully adds “Eartham”, the village north-east of Chichester, between Goodwood Park and Slindon. They are also dated, one from 1 November 1897, and the other from 1 November 1898. Neither has a determination.
The dates are a bit puzzling. Looking at the rest of the collection, there are 24 moss specimens from Longdown, all of which were collected on 1 November 1897, and all but one of which bears the initials of Guermonprez’s sister Harriet. Still, Henry Guermonprez was certainly present; the location of one specimen of Hypnum cupressiforme (TN2784/279) is helpfully annotated in his handwriting “where we had lunch”. The two siblings were back in Eartham a year later, on 14 November 1898, though the specimens from that date are mostly from walls, with a couple from banks, and none specifically from Long Down. Assuming the location as written is correct, it seems most likely that the two liverworts were both collected on 1 November 1897.
A quick look at the drawings and the specimens immediately enables their identification: Metzgeria furcata, and Lophocolea bidentata, both very common species, and the latter appears to be a new tetrad record for SU90J. But why did Guermonprez not manage to identify them?
One simple answer is that he had only been supplied mosses by Monington, so had no reference specimens, and that may well be all there is to it. However, it’s worth considering this in the context of the published sources for liverworts at this period. The group were not especially well served. Benjamin Carrington (1827-1893) produced the first four parts of his British Hepaticae in 1874, though his failing health resulted in his ceasing what would otherwise have been an invaluable work.[1] Subsequently, Carrington worked with his friend William Henry Pearson (1849–1923) on their Hepaticae Britannicae exsiccatae (1878-1890), though such a collection of dried specimens was only produced in very small numbers.
Considering the absence of a book on liverworts in these decades, in the early 1890s Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1825-1914) substantially revised what had previously been published as a Science Gossip spin-off volume; his Easy Guide to the Study of British Hepaticae (1865) was expanded as the Handbook of British Hepaticae (1894), and so would have been available to Guermonprez. I wonder if Guermonprez bought it, though? A review of it by “A.G.” in the Journal of Botany, British and Foreign isn’t very flattering, even if the “most glaring faults of the earlier compilation [had] been removed”. Even so, it still did not have a glossary or key, and the reviewer maintained that the “ideal handbook has yet to be written”. It must have sold adequately well, though, as it was reissued in 1907.
Cooke’s book was all that was actually available to Guermonprez in 1897 if he wanted something to help identify the Eartham species, though Pearson started work on his The Hepaticae of the British Isles shortly after. This book came out in parts from 1899 to 1902, and is a fine work, with 228 plates. However, it was incredibly expensive, selling for £7 10s (or £11 2s 6d if you chose the coloured plates). Guermonprez could have afforded it, of course, but this group of plants clearly never inspired him to devote much time to them. I’d be surprised if he bought it.
It wasn’t until 1912 that an affordable book was finally produced. This was The Student’s Handbook of British Hepatics by Symers Macvicar (1857-1932), which is the companion volume to Dixon’s moss book from 1896; not only does it have the analogous title, but was also published by the same Eastbourne publisher. Its second edition appeared in 1926, was reissued in 1960, and was a mainstay of British bryology for decades.
There is one more occasion that we know of when news of a Sussex liverwort reached Guermonprez’s desk. Christine Taylor at Portsmouth Museum has recently found a letter from Bernard Reynolds within the Guermonprez correspondence, in which he notes:
“I did not tell you that I found Riccia fluitans in a ditch at the Wild Brooks, Amberley recently – Prof Judd tells me it has not been recorded for West Sussex before. I do not go in for mosses and gathered this as some green plant so it was quite accidental.” (27 October 1908)
Now, Riccia fluitans can be common in many ditches at Amberley, but this is the first record I know of from the site. Reynolds (1866-1941) taught music, and Christine notes that in another letter he tells Guermonprez that he had just been appointed cello teacher at Christ’s Hospital School. His natural history interests appear to focus on vascular plants.[2] His informant about its status in Sussex was John Wesley Judd (1840-1916), a prominent geologist, who must also have had an interest in botany, at least as evidenced from some letters to William Carruthers at the Natural History Museum (DF BOT/404/1/4/53). His source for the county distribution was presumably the recently-published Census Catalogue of British Hepatics (Macvicar 1905). When William Nicholson compiled his account of Sussex liverwort species a few years later (1911), he did record Riccia fluitans in West Sussex, though it’s not clear if his source for that was this information from Bernard Reynolds to Guermonprez.[3]
So, Henry Guermonprez was even less engaged with hepatics/liverworts than he was with mosses. But, given the availability of books on this group at the time, that is perhaps not that surprising. By the time Macvicar’s book was published in 1912, what interest Guermonprez had had for any bryophytes at all had largely passed. Still, even though there are just a few instances of liverworts impinging on Guermonprez’s natural historical consciousness, and they are largely not that exciting, this has at least given me the opportunity to better understand some of the practicalities of learning about this group in the last years of the nineteenth century.
Bibliography
A.G. (1894). [Review of] Handbook of British hepaticae… Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 32, 54–58. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/35443685
Carrington, B. (1874). British Hepaticae: Containing descriptions and figures of the native species of Jungermannia, Marchantia, and Anthoceros. R. Hardwicke. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/114892
Cooke, M. C. (1894). Handbook of British Hepaticae: Containing descriptions and figures of the indigenous species of Marchantia, Jungermannia, Riccia and Anthoceros. W.H. Allen & Co. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/67181
Dixon, H. N., & Jameson, H. G. (1896). The Student’s Handbook of British Mosses. V. T. Sumfield.
Macvicar, S. M. (1905). Census Catalogue of British Hepatics. Moss Exchange Club.
Macvicar, S. M. (1912). The Student’s Handbook of British Hepatics. V.T. Sumfield. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002105017
Nicholson, W. E. (1911). The Hepatics of Sussex. Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist, 1(6), 243–292.
Pearson, W. H. (1893). In memory of Benjamin Carrington. Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 31, 120–122. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/35142016
Pearson, W. H. (1899-1902). The Hepaticae of the British Isles, being figures and descriptions of all known British species. (Vol. 1–2). Lovell Reeve. https://bibdigital.rjb.csic.es/idurl/1/16471
[1] Carrington was a physician, working in general practice in the north of England. He died in Brighton on 18 January 1893. He may possibly have moved to Brighton for his health. He was boarding at 14 Grafton Street in Kemp Town when the 1891 census was taken, and was described as “of 120 Queen’s-Park-road” when probate was granted to his widow Caroline, along with William Henry Pearson, and John Dixon. See an obituary by Pearson (1893). I don’t think Carrington collected bryophytes when he was in Sussex.
[2] There are some of his collections recorded on Herbaria@Home, and he occasionally contributed information to botany periodicals, eg Reynolds, B. (1912). Papaver rhoeas var. chelidonioides O. Kuntze. Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 50, 348; Reynolds, B. (1912). Boston dock aliens. Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 50, 350; and Reynolds, B. (1924). Norfolk plants. Botanical Society and Exchange Club of the British Isles: Report for 1923, 7, 252–253.
[3] As it happens, this wasn’t the first record of Riccia fluitans in West Sussex. Johan Jakob Dillenius and Thomas Manningham “observed it plentifully in the Ditches about Chichester” about three hundred years ago (see Riccia fluitans on this blog).
Sussex Bryophytes 
The ‘A.G.’ who wrote the review of Cooke’s book must have been Anthony Gepp (1862-1955) who specialised in cryptogamic botany at the Natural History Museum.
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