self close to the midrib, like the sticks of a shut fan, and the footstalk itself of the leaf has a joint at the axilla, by which it drops and stands at ease. This is the Humble Plant, Mimosa pudica, very different from the Sensitive Plant, M. sensitiva, which you will see in the great Palm Stove. Though both are so curious, and one so pretty here at home, in Brazil and the West Indies they are nuisances to be exterminated by fire. Their prickly stems choke the growth of sweeter herbage ;--neither is it clear that the cattle like to have their noses tickled by the motions of living plants that writhe when they begin to be eaten. And now a small bellglass is lifted; the scissors touch a pair of scaly leaves fringed with green bristles; they close it is the American Fly-trap, (Dionaa muscipula,) which has, as its name implies, a veritable living trap at the end of its leaves. Listen to what is said :

this? On the door stares the word PRI- | divisions seem made up of scores of little VATE. "The Director may be a sort of Blue | leaflets ;--and, mark !—each leaflet folds itBeard, and these are his secret dens. Oh, if I could but rummage in these for one five minutes! And they call this throwing open the collection to the public! It is pretty cool of the Guide-book to tell us that No. 21 is a substantial new Propagation-house, kept private at this time chiefly occupied by the numerous young plants reared from Dr. Hooker's seeds of Sikkim-Himalayan Rhododendrons;' and that No. 4 is another Double Propagation-house on an admirable construction; that it is used as a hospital for valetudinarian vegetables, and rickety or seasick plants which require peculiar care and attention, and, therefore, this house is most frequently kept locked, because what is in it is of little or no interest to the public generally! Very provoking. I do not believe it."-Do not, quite; for we contrived to insinuate ourselves into one of the tyrant's hiding-places, having caught him in one of his mollia tempora fandi, and detected there in the very fact-" of what?"—of growing-a double cocoa-nut, all the way from the Seychelles. There !-that was a secret. While double cocoa-nuts were believed to grow in sub-marine palm forests, one of them would purchase a ship's cargo; but now times are sadly altered, and their price has dropped thousands per cent.

upon us.

Into this small and recently erected low stove we may enter, on the disobliging condition of shutting the door after us; for a little cool breath would be agreeable-and see what grimaces those persons are making before they dare venture to plunge into the heated air, though it is not worse than the gallery-stalls at the Opera. Really the public are very amusing; they have an idea that this, on a large scale, will exactly suit their taste. But wonders and beauties crowd The plant there should have been dedicated to St. Vitus. It has got the fidgets incurably. Night and day, from its seed-bed to its repose in the compost heap, it twitches and twists the two little leaflets that grow on each side the larger oval leaf. Without perceptible cause or motive-except the indulgence of its own caprice-the Moving-plant, Desmodium (once Hedysyrum) gyrans, goes on with its antics. But other beauties in this nice boudoir have taken lessons of the posture-master. A tall gentleman, who is followed by a string of listeners eager to catch every word he drops, takes from his waistcoat pocket a pair of scissors; with these he snips the tip of a pretty leaf, whose

"The moment an insect (or any extraneous body) touches the hairs on the disc, the two lobes close firmly and press the luckless intruder to death; the struggles of the victim indeed, occasioning the lobes to shut more firmly, hasten its

own destruction. As soon as the insect ceases to struggle, and dies, the trap opens, ready to continue the work of destruction; but there is no reason whatever to suppose that the dead insects in any way nourish the plant."

What, then, can be the object of the contrivance, unless the checking a superabundance. of insect life? The facts are not novel, but are too wonderful ever to become stale. Gigantic plants existed in præadamite times. If there were then a Fly-trap large enough to catch a man! You have rightly guessed that our conductor, so full of information and so kind in imparting it, is Sir W. H. himself. He crushes an evergreen leaf, and gives it to a friend to enjoy the perfume, perceptibly that of the clove; to another he offers a bruised morsel of the lemon-grass, having a delicate odor like the three-leaved Verbena. Tea from this fragrant herb was a favorite beverage with the good Queen Charlotte; and the rumor is that it is not unpalatable to the most illustrious of her Majesty's descendants. Observe the Caricature Plant, with bright green leaves something like those of the Bay-tree, but marked down the middle with yellow blotches, the outline of many of which bears a very accurate resemblance to the human face, more or less divine. Here is the Duke, and here Lord Brougham,

A

dos à dos, on the same leaf; there is Pitt; | to cultivate in a large canal, crossed at interPunch and Judy seem the principal charac- vals by tasty bridges, the Victoria regia and ters on the next. You may remember that, other marine plants! The lapsus lingua on the first restoration of Louis XVIII., a dispelled the whole charm of the scene. colored print of a bunch of violettes was con- new aquarium at Kew will by-and-by retrived to show profiles of Napoleon, his Em-ceive the Victoria; but even in its humble press, and the King of Rome;-a leaf turned back did the office of the immortal cockedhat. That little pot-plant, labelled Dorstenia, shows a curious fructification. It is something like a flat piece of green leather growing at the end of a flower-stalk, and is, in fact, a flat, open receptacle of minute flowers visible with a magnifier. It is a strange in termediate form; for roll it up with the flowers outside, and it is a bread-fruit; with them inside, and it is a fig. Were the ripened receptacle large and juicy enough to be eaten, it would be literally a fruit-cake. In that corner stands a pot of ginger, not preserved, except from unnecessary handling. It would take a long day to pay due attention to everything in this one small hot-house. We will visit it again.

A moderate-sized apartment not far distant must be entered with courage, and yet with reverence. Therein swims in state the Queen of Plants. She would be confessedly a Cleopatra, were she not something better, a Victoria. It is stifling hot; and pray mind the descent. Warm work for the young man who remains here on duty, even though her Majesty consents to admit him to her presence in uncoated full dress! It feels the closer for the roof being so low; but most plants thrive the better for being brought near the glass, or for the glass being brought near to them. The cultivation of long-growing plants and shrubs would not be easy in a crystal cathedral. A forest of palms or a wilderness of bamboos would be more thrifty there than a series of flower-beds, to be sauntered amongst and gazed upon by promenaders of ordinary stature. But that is not our affair. Pictorial arguments are the order of the day. Mr. Leech's most alluring sketch of "John Bull in his Winter Garden' gives the blooming Victoria as a detail. But the plant is dormant in winter, unless it is to be forced; and the forcing that will make it a nice task for the gardener to avoid boiling it.

may

By such shows as this-as Punch, smil ing in his sleeve, well knows-the multitude are led. Another dioramic feeler of what be tried on was explained by a lecturer, who, while modestly abstaining from discussing the feasibility of the project, still in formed the admiring spectators of the Winter Garden by gas-light, that it was proposed

tank it is a vegetable wonder, putting forth
alternately a blossom and a leaf, the latter
not the less curious of the two, and looking,
as it begins to emerge, very like a hedgehog
swimming on its back. The little wheel,
used at Chatsworth, at Syon, and in the
Regent's Park Botanical Gardens, to keep
the surface water in agitation, is here found
unnecessary for the health of the plant. The
leaf attains its curious rim, and also perfects
the honey-combed air-chambers in the under
surface, by which its buoyancy is increased,
enabling it, with management-that is, by
equalizing the pressure-to support as much
as ten stone weight. Another floating con-
trivance is seen in a corner of the same tank,
in Pontederia crassipes, the footstalks of
whose leaves are swollen into bladders.
the foot of the Victoria reposes the pretty
Nymphæa pygmaa, a dwarf water-lily, with
white flowers the size of a shilling; and on
one side the Nelumbium speciosum, which
furnished the bouquet to the ladies whose
mummies adorn the British Museum, still
offers to us its blossoms, though of paler
coloring.

At

Let us pass the handsome symmetrical lake, thread the parterre of gaudy flowers, mount the steps conducting to the terrace, and enter the Palm-stove. We can now form some idea of a tropical forest; a tiger might start out from among these tree-ferns, a boaconstrictor might be climbing the trunk of that cocoa-nut palm, humming-birds might be darting amidst the leaves of those Bananas. Every plant has its own interesting history, but we can only glance at a few of the most remarkable. The tall shrub with crimson hollyhock-like flowers is the Hibiscus-rosa Sinensis; its blossoms are used in China to black shoes with! A plant inconspicuous in such a place as the great Palm

The plant was first introduced at Kew-from which the rest areoffsets. It first flowered at Chatsworth, next at Kew,then at Kew's charming neighbor, Syon-where this summer both the leaves, like enormous green card-tables, and the unrivalled splendor of the flower, were admired by so many visitors, through the princely generosity of the Duke of Nortumberland, who may be said to have for the season of the Great National Exhibition surren dered to the public both his London palace-the only real one of our old nobility now remaining— and this equally unrivalled suburbanum.

stove, but of considerable botanical import- | occurred here. The gardeners are now, ance as an exaggerated instance of what however, pretty well aware where such might, be called vegetable malformation, mischievous powers lie dormant, and stranwhich yet works well in the long run, is gers have no business to volunteer dubious the Xylophylla falcata, i. e., the scythe- experiments. The horticultural official, who shaped wooden-leaf, from the Bahamas. It serves a friend of ours, places a stinging has phylloid branches, or green branches plant, the Loasa urens, with its pretty yellow flattened and resembling leaves, even more flowers and dangerous leaves, in a conspicdeceptive than those of the New Holland uous part of his greenhouse, to teach medAcacias, being inserted horizontally, in the dlesome children-and ladies-by the blisters usual position of leaves on the stem, instead on their poor hands, that it is safer to admire of vertically. The flowers, and occasionally, than to touch. Public and private establishthough rarely, true leaves, appear in what ments are quite different affairs, and such would be the serratures in a true leaf, but tricks at home look much like inexcusable what in the metamorphosed branch must be treachery, but the instance will show what considered as axilla. A vegetable of some caution ought to be exercised in a national notoriety is the Cibotium Barometz, or Scy- botanic garden. thian lamb-the vegetable lamb of Tartary, which, according to the writers of olden time, ate up all the herbage within its reach, but, being itself rooted to the ground, eventually perished of hunger. The proof of the story was the presence of this lamb in the cabinets of the curious. Seeing, it was thought, must be believing. Our plant reveals the mystery. The woolly rhizoma (of which the hare's-foot fern is an analogous example) is of considerable substance, and grows into curious contortions and nodosities. Four shortened frond-stalks, left for the dried specimen to stand on when turned upside down, completed the verity of a vegetable lamb. There grow here, however, things useful as well as things passing strange. Observe the chocolate-nut tree, Theobroma Cacao, "food for the gods," putting forth flowers from the thickest part of its woody trunk, to be succeeded by nuts in the same situation, instead of on the twiggy branches. Here is the mango tree, Mangifera Indica, with its fruit pendulous at the end of a long stalk, playing the most tempting bob-cherry; for though bad varieties are no better than tow and turpentine, first-rate numbers leave a delicious taste in the mouth, which is remembered for years and years, like the cream. tarts by which the widow of Noureddin Ali recognized the neighborhood of her cruelly mystified Bedreddin. Each fruit here is Each fruit here is secured in a little bag-net, to prevent accidents, and to make hereafter a dainty dish to set before a Queen.

From pleasant fruits and "Herbes of Vertue," turn we now to the "banes and poysons of pernitious and malignant temperature." The Caladium seguinum, or dumb-cane, had better not be bitten, or it will bite in return, depriving lips and tongue of all power of speech. Instances of its virulence have

The most deadly plant ever possessed by Kew, the Jatropha urens, is no longer to be found there; it has either been killed off like a mad dog, or starved to death in isolation like a leper. Its possession nearly cost. one valuable life, that of Mr. Smith, the present respected curator. Some five and twenty years ago he was reaching over the Jatropha, when its fine bristly stings touched. his wrist. The first sensation was a numbness and swelling of, the lips; the action of the poison was on the heart, circulation was stopped, and Mr. Smith soon fell unconscious, the last thing he remembered being cries of "Run for the doctor." Either the doctor was skilful, or the dose of poison injected not quite, though nearly, enough; but afterwards the man in whose house it was, got it shoved up in a corner, and would not come within arm's length of it. He watered the diabolical plant with a pot having an indefinitely long spout. If the vase itself contained a quid pro quo, he is not to be greatly blamed. Another not much less fearful species of jatropha has appeared at Kew-and disappeared.

We must ascend the spiral staircase, and run round the gallery-for the sake of looking down on the luxuriant tree-ferns and palms, admiring the charming effect of the symmetrical flower-beds, and gazing along the vista of infant Deodaras at the noble Pagodaonly wanting the Dragons and Bells at the angles of the stratum super stratum to present a complete fac-simile of the far-famed one at Nankin. At this height the creepers admit of close inspection :-Note the flowers of the Aristolochia gigas, shaped like a helmet, and so huge that the children in South America, according to Humboldt, wear them as hats. Aristolochia is Englished Birth-wort, for reasons which the scholar will understand.

The

loaves of the purest white, of French manu- | Masseranduba, or Milk-tree of Para, a little facture-and indeed the common sugar of loaf of the milk in a concrete state, and a France-from the Beta vulgaris, a native not portion of the stem with the milk exuding; of this country but of the south of Europe; Shea butter from the Niger, made from gamboge, of which there are various species, the kernels of Bassia Parkii, with the kerthe best being the Hebradendron pictorum, nels themselves and leaves of the tree. The although the gardens possess but one sort spathe which protects the flowers of Maxialive-viz. "the Xanthochymus pictorius of miliana regia is used as a canoe; the natives Roxburgh, of which the fruits, which ripen paddle themselves across a stream in one, with us, yield, on being punctured, the juice and then throw it aside as soon as done with. which concretes into one kind of gumboge, the A spathe in the gallery measures 7 ft. 6 most powerful of drastic medicines, and af- inches in length and 19 inches in breadth. fording the brightest and best known of yel- Other unexpected uses of vegetables are low colors." The ivory-nut palm, (Phyte- disclosed. Dr. Hooker has sent home a pair laphas macrocarpa,) from New Grenada, is of vegetable bellows made of the leaves of fully illustrated. Here is the stem of the a tree, and used for smelting iron by the plant, a portion of the wood-if such it can natives south of the Sone River, India. be called the spathes-the flowers-the aggregate fruit, like a Negro's head-the nuts-a nut with the radicle and plumule just germinating-besides various articles manufactured of this vegetable ivory.

The temples of Pan and Confucius, which once ornamented the gardens, have alike passed away, but the Museum more than supplies their place as an admirable Temple of Science. Strange uses of vegetables are disclosed to whosoever shall seek for initiation into the mysteries of this unsuperstitious fane. It is true the Cannon-ball Tree of Guiana, Couroupita Guianensis, though it does put forth odd-looking globes, does not actually furnish ammunition to the South Americans. Its shells are not dangerously explosive, but are used, like the calabash, for domestic purposes. Its fruit is said to be vinous and pleasant when fresh, and the only mischief it does is to emit when decayed an insupportably offensive odor. But the Towel Gourd, Luffa Ægyptiaca, a native of the tropics, is used both as wadding for guns and as a sponge. The Bottle-gourds are well known and the epidermis of the 21 Andromachia igniaria, (Quito,) used as tinEder, is only one of a numerous list of similar substances; but many of our readers will be surprised to hear of the Caripe or Potterytree of Para. The bark is burnt and ground, and the ashes are mixed with clay to make vessels. It enables them to stand the fire without breaking, and in the vast alluvial plains of the Amazon is doubtless a valuable succedaneum. In one single compartment of a case are shown leaves, wood, bark, ashes, and earthen vessels, all the produce of this pottery-tree. Then we have a small collection of dairy plants-a bottle of milk from the Cow-tree, Galactodendron utile, and a portion of its stem; leaves of the

VOL. XXV. NO. III.

Many of the fruits in the Museum differ much from what we expect to. find them. The Nux romica, Strychnos nux vomica, is a capsule like a large discolored dried orange, containing a number of flat seeds which furnish the poison. The Sacred Bean of the Egyptians, so often seen in their monumental decorations, Nelumbium speciosum, looks in its dried state like a circular piece of over-baked pudding stuck full of hazel-nuts. The Banksias from New South Wales give the idea of shell-fish rather than of fruit. They resemble a number of little oysters naturally adhering around a cylindrical stick and imbedded in mossy sea-weed, the kernel representing the contained mollusk. There are pods of the Cassia Fistula, used in medicine as a cathartic, 2 feet 1 inch in length, like long thin sausages; pods of an unknown species of greater diameter are 2 feet 6 inches long; those of the Entada Pursaetha, another leguminous plant, may be seen 2 inches across. A natural alarum is afforded by the Hura crepitans or Sand-box of Jamaica, a plant belonging to the Euphorbias, whose large circular seed-vessel, unless confined by a string or wire, splits into a number of pieces, and scatters its contents with a sound loud enough to wake a sleeping botanist.

We usually think we know all about tea by our acquaintance with its vulgar shapes of Hyson, Souchong, &c. &c.; but there is such a thing as brick tea, which Dr. Hooker has brought from Thibet, looking in its paper package something like a mis-shapen cheese

another sort compressed like scrap-cake for dogs: small ball tea, answering to bull's eyes for children, and large ball tea inclosed in the husks of Indian corn. The climax of all, as fancy articles in this line, are wheatsheaf tea, in bundles just large enough to

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