no millioniare amongst them ever spent such an amount of money as this upon flowers alone.*

I shall close the poetical quotations on the Rose with one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give :
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly,
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses;
But for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade;

Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so;

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:

And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth.

There are many hundred acres of rose trees at Ghazeepore which are cultivated for distillation, and making "attar." There are large fields of roses in England also, for the manufacture of rose-water.

There is a story about the origin of attar of Roses. The Princess Nourmahal caused a large tank, on which she used to be rowed about with the great Mogul, to be filled with rose-water. The heat of the sun separating the water from the essential oil of the rose, the latter was observed to be floating on the surface. The discovery was immediately turned to good account. At Ghazeepoor, the essence, atta or uttar or otto, or whatever it should be called, is obtained with great simplicity and ease. After the rose water is prepared it is put into large open vessels which are left out at night. Early in the morning the oil that floats upon the surface is skimmed off, or sucked up with fine dry cotton wool, put into bottles, and carefully sealed. Bishop Heber says that to produce one rupee's weight of atta 200,000 well grown roses are required, and that

*

Mary Howitt mentions that amongst the private cultivators of roses in the neighbourhood of London, the well-known publisher Mr. Henry S. Bohn is particularly distinguished. In his garden at Twickenham one thousand varieties of the rose are brought to great perfection. He gives a sort of floral fête to his friends in the height of the rose season.

a rupee's weight sells from 80 to 100 rupees. The atta sold in Calcutta is commonly adulterated with the oil of sandal wood.

LINNEA BOREALIS.

The LINNEA BOREALIS, or two flowered Linnæa, though a simple Lapland flower, is interesting to all botanists from its association with the name of the Swedish Sage. It has pretty little bells and is very fragrant. It is a wild unobstrusive plant and is very averse to the trim lawn and the gay flowerborder. This little woodland beauty pines away under too much notice. She prefers neglect, and would rather waste her sweetness on the desert air, than be introduced into the fashionable lists of Florist's flowers. She shrinks from exposure to the sun. A gentleman after walking with Linnæus on the shores of the lake near Charlottendal on a lovely evening, writes thus: "I gathered a small flower and asked if it was the Linnæa borealis. Nay,' said the philosopher, she lives not here, but in the middle of our largest woods. She clings with her little arms to the moss, and seems to resist very gently if you force her from it. She has a complexion like a milkmaid, and ah! she is very, very sweet and agreeable !'”

THE FORGET-ME-NOT.

The dear little FORGET-ME-NOT, (myosotis palustris) with its eye of blue, is said to have derived its touching appellation from a sentimental German story. Two lovers were walking on the bank of a rapid stream. The lady beheld the flower growing on a little island, and expressed a passionate desire to possess it. He gallantly plunged into the stream and obtained the flower; but exhausted by the force of the tide, he had only sufficient strength left as he neared the shore to fling the flower at the fair one's feet, and exclaim "Forget-me-not!" (Vergissmein-nicht). He was then carried away by the stream, out of her sight for ever.*

*The learned dry the flower of the Forget-me-not and flatten it down in their herbals, and call it, Myosotis Scorpioides-Scorpion-shaped mouse's ear! They have been reproached for this by a brother savant, Charles Nodier, who was not a learned man only but a man of wit and sense.— Alphonse Karr.

THE PERIWINKLE.

The PERIWINKLE (vinca or pervinca) has had its due share of poetical distinction. In France the common people call it the Witch's violet. It seems to have suggested to Wordsworth an idea of the consciousness of flowers.

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,

The Periwinkle trailed its wreaths,

And 'tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

Mr. J. L. Merritt, has some complimentary lines on this flower.

The Periwinkle with its fan-like leaves

All nicely levelled, is a lovely flower

Whose dark wreath, myrtle like, young Flora weaves;

The little blue Periwinkle is rendered especially interesting to the admirers of the genius of Rousseau by an anecdote that records his emotion on meeting it in one of his botanical excursions. He had seen it thirty years before in company with Madame de Warens. On meeting its sweet face again, after so long and eventful an interim, he fell upon his knees, crying out-Ah! voila de la perranche! "It struck him," says Hazlitt, " as the same little identical flower that he remembered so well; and thirty years of sorrow and bitter regret were effaced from his memory."

The Periwinkle was once supposed to be a cure for many diseases. Lord Bacon says that in his time people afflicted with cramp wore bands of green periwinkle tied about their limbs. It had also its supposed moral influences. According to Culpepper the leaves of the flower if eaten by man and wife together would revive between them a lost affection.

THE BASIL.

Sweet marjoram, with her like, sweet basil, rare for smell.

Drayton.

The BASIL is a plant rendered poetical by the genius which has handled it. Boccaccio and Keats have made the name of the

sweet basil sound pleasantly in the ears of many people who know nothing of botany. A species of this plant (known in Europe under the botanical name of Ocymum villosum, and in India as the Toolsee) is held sacred by the Hindus. Toolsee was a disciple of Vishnu. Desiring to be his wife she excited the jealousy of Lukshmee by whom she was transformed into the herb named after her.*

THE TULIP.

Tulips, like the ruddy evening streaked.

Southey.

The TULIP (tulipa) is the glory of the garden, as far as color without fragrance can confer such distinction. Some suppose it to be The Lily of the Field' alluded to in the Sermon on the Mount. It grows wild in Syria.

6

The name of the tulip is said to be of Turkish origin. It was called Tulipa from its resemblance to the tulipan or turban.

What crouds the rich Divan to-day
With turbaned heads, of every hue

Bowing before that veiled and awful face

Like Tulip-beds of different shapes and dyes,

Bending beneath the invisible west wind's sighs?

Moore.

The reader has probably heard of the Tulipomania once carried to so great an excess in Holland.

With all his phlegm, it broke a Dutchman's heart,

At a vast price, with one loved root to part.

Crabbe.

About the middle of the 17th century the city of Haarlem realized in three years ten millions sterling by the sale of tulips.

*The Abbé Molina in his History of Chili mentions a species of basil which he calls ocymum salinum: he says it resembles the common basil, except that the stalk is round and jointed; and that though it grows sixty miles from the sea, yet every morning it is covered with saline globules, which are hard and splendid, appearing at a distance like dew; and that each plant furnishes about an ounce of fine salt every day, which the peasants collect and use as common salt, but esteem it superior in flavour.-Notes to Darwin's Loves of the Plants.

A single tulip (the Semper Augustus) was sold for one thousand pounds. Twelve acres of land were given for a single root and engagements to the amount of £5,000 were made for a first-class tulip when the mania was at its height. A gentleman, who possessed a tulip of great value, hearing that some one was in possession of a second root of the same kind, eagerly secured it at a most extravagant price. The moment he got possession of it, he crushed it under his foot. "Now," he exclaimed, "my tulip is unique !"

A Dutch Merchant gave a sailor a herring for his breakfast. Jack seeing on the Merchant's counter what he supposed to be a heap of onions, took up a handful of them and ate them with his fish. The supposed onions were tulip bulbs of such value that they would have paid the cost of a thousand Royal feasts.*

The tulip mania never reached so extravagant a height in England as in Holland, but our country did not quite escape the contagion, and even so late as the year 1836 at the sale of Mr. Clarke's tulips at Croydon, seventy two pounds were given for a single bulb of the Fanny Kemble; and a Florist in Chelsea in the same year, priced a bulb in his catalogue at 200 guineas.

The Tulip is not endeared to us by many poetical associations. We have read, however, one pretty and romantic tale about it. A poor old woman who lived amongst the wild hills of Dartmoor, in Devonshire, possessed a beautiful bed of Tulips, the pride of her small garden. One fine moonlight night her attention was arrested by the sweet music which seemed to issue from a thousand Liliputian choristers. She found that the sounds proceeded from her many colored bells of Tulips. After watching the flowers intently she perceived that they were not

* The Dutch are a strange people and of the most heterogeneous composition. They have an odd mixture in their nature of the coldest utilitarianism and the most extravagant romance. A curious illustration of this is furnished in their tulipomania, in which there was a struggle between the love of the substantial and the love of the beautiful. One of their authors enumerates the following articles as equivalent in money value to the price of one tulip root" two lasts of wheat-four lasts of rye-four fat oxen-eight fat swine-twelve fat sheep-two hogsheads of wine-four tons of butter-one thousand pounds of cheese-a complete bed-a suit of clothes-and a silver drinking cup."