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very like the wild cabbage that grows on not have been the bread corn of King our seashore would be reached. Even Alfred's subjects, and of the humblest of the queen of flowers seems to regret the Chaucer's pilgrims. It likes to advance loss of her simplicity and single corolla, slowly, by gradations of heat, through a and instead of unfolding a multitude of long spring, and dislikes a sudden jump petals in the act of inflorescence, humble from a winter mean of 32° Fahr. to a green leaves sometimes appear in their summer heat of 73° as at Cincinnati. place. When this happens, our flower The stems dwindle when drawn up too queen is in fact abdicating and reverting rapidly, and the coronal roots which are to her original and more humble condition. put forth here in April, become abortive, There is a second principle which aids pointing to the ground like a necklace of the plant improver, and is continually ac- green thorns surrounding the crown of tive in producing changes in the forms of the plant, but failing to reach it or to perplants growing in the field of nature. It form their function of absorbing nouris the inherent disposition to sterility in ishment. Wheat, therefore, can only be plants that are exposed to changed condi- grown profitably, on a comparatively tions of life. Not only are many tropical small area in North America, and on species infertile in our hot-houses, but gravel and sands and second-rate soils of the Alpine plants seldom produce any hard texture, which counteract the effect seed in gardens, and the Persian and of climate. Maize is the bread-corn of Chinese lilacs (Syringa Persica and S. North America, yielding, as a maximum, Chinensis), though hardy here, are ster-twenty quarters (a hundred and sixty ile, like the common lilac (S. Vulgaris) in Germany. Absolute sterility cannot, of course, become hereditary. Plants remain productive without seed, when there are tubers, buds, slips, suckers, grafts, etc., to fall back upon; complete infertility would, indeed, be the bane of horticulture, which knows how to profit by incipient sterility, and can generally find a seed or two, even in a double balsam.

bushels) per acre on soft, rich soils, which cannot be relied on for twenty bushels of wheat. But maize, too, has its habit. It yields magnificent crops on the plains of the Scioto and Miami, feeders of the Ohio, remaining in the ground only three or four months, instead of the nine or ten months during which wheat occupies the land between its autumn sowing and late summer ripening; but in Alabama the Two principles of plant life act and re- giant grain of the New World finds that act in nature, within limits which the undue measure of heat and moisture well-being of the plant, or the object of which induces abnormal growth. It is the cultivator may determine; but to a drawn up to a height of sixteen or eighgreat extent the habit of plants is an in-teen feet, and yields only half the crops herent quality, and individual plants that are reaped in Ohio, Tennessee, exhibit dispositions that differ like those | Kentucky, and Illinois. of animals. There are innumerable in- Passing a step further south for other stances of a sort of fickleness in the examples of habit, we find that rice rebehaviour of plants. We are unable to places maize and wheat in the tropics, assign the cause why the little moon-wort and possesses an inherent elasticity and fern of the Surrey Downs should sicken power of ranging which enables it to and die in sheltered spots below the hill, climb from the plains of Bengal up the or why some varieties of pelargoniums are lower slopes of the Himalayas, while ansterile and others fertile, under similar other variety has produced seeds on the conditions, or why, in other cases, slight banks of the Thames, and another flourchanges in position should make all the ishes in the watered flats of Carolina. difference, so that a plant may yield seed Another kind, called clammy rice, subat the top of a bank and refuse to do so mits either to wet or dry lands, while the at its base. The various cereals are common rice of Asia, Africa, and America rigid in reference to their several seed-is a marsh plant, and must be sown and producing habits, and cultivators cannot brought to maturity in a puddle, with the force any of them to exceed their inherent aid of a natural or artificial irrigation. powers in this respect. Wheat will yield from forty to sixty bushels on an acre of good land, and it runs to stem and becomes diseased if forced beyond its bent. A typical climate for wheat is that of the Castiles, but that of our south-eastern counties is not bad for it, or wheat would

The early kinds ripen in four months, and the later in six months after sowing, the slightest frost kills the common kinds, while the mountain rice of Nepaul is sown in autumn, and the young blades are nursed through the winter under a coat of snow.

Sugar also affords its lessons on habit. Rest is the remedy for over-work in In Cuba - an adopted home which suits plants as well as horses. Linnæus, losit well the cane lasts twenty-five years, ing his own rest, was the first to oband sometimes forty years, without be- serve that the plants in his garden ing renewed; but in the delta of the Mis- slept every night, inaudibly, but manisissippi and in Louisiana it must be re- festly, each species having its blossoms newed every two years; and in a colder and leaves arranged in characteristic atticlimate in Alabama it loses the status of tudes. The bird's-foot trefoil, for ina perennial, and becomes an uncertain annual, by a rapid transition like that which affects the annuals of temperate regions, when they pass, by themselves or their nearest relative, into the form of perennials in warm climates, as in the case of the castor-oil plant and the mallows.

Larger crops of vegetables can be raised when they are grown for their tubers, roots, or stems, than when they are grown for their seed, because the natural habit of seed-bearing plants is a bar to increased production. The grainconsumers of temperate climates live, therefore, at a dearer rate than the people who feed on bananas, potatoes, or starch-yielding plants, like the manihot, which yields tapioca and the cassava bread of Brazil.

stance, folds up its leaves at night, and the chickweed closes them; the vetch, sweet pea, and broad bean rest them one against the other. The composite leaves appear to be the most sleepy of any. The hours of sleeping are a matter of habit, and may be disturbed artificially, just as a cock may be woke up and made to crow at untimely hours by the light of a lantern. De Candolle subjected a sensitive plant to an exceedingly trying course of discipline, by completely changing its hours; exposing it to a bright light all night, so as to prevent sleep, and putting it in a dark room during the day. The plant appeared to be much puzzled and disturbed at first; it opened and closed its leaves irregularly, sometimes nodding in spite of the artificial sun that shed its beams at midnight, and sometimes wakIt is a serious drawback to the profits ing up, from the force of habit, to find of sewage cultivation that only certain the chamber dark in spite of the time of plants are disposed to consume so much day. Such are the trammels of use and liquid as is offered to them under that sys-wont! But after an obvious struggle the tein of management. Cereals are not plant submitted to the change, and turned drinkers to any large extent, and will not day into night without any apparent ill suddenly change their habit. They have effects. enough to do to swallow the ordinary Besides their daily rest, plants require amount of wet which prevails in our cli- periodic seasons of repose. They sleep mate, being naturally partial to rather when the temperature falls below a cerdrier countries, like South Russia, Po-tain point, as the bear and the dormouse land, and Spain. Italian rye-grass is a enter upon their winter's sleep at the apdrinker, having learned the habit, per-proach of cold weather; and like the haps, in the irrigated plains of Lom-fishes of some tropical countries, whose bardy; and it is not expected to produce waking functions are arrested by the heat, seed, but only a bulky growth of forage. which dries up the ponds they live in, so, It has done its best to please the sewage too, in the burning deserts of Africa, farmers in the matter of drink, but on bulbs and other plants lie dormant through another point it offers a curious example the season when the functions of vegeof the force of habit. By the use of an table life would be impossible, and burst enormous amount of liquid it was ex-again into leaf and flower with the return pected to yield unheard-of crops; and accordingly it did yield 100 tons per acre in one season, but it made the effort at the cost of its life, dying during the winter instead of yielding another crop next year. The same result has followed whenever the powers of this great water-drinker were taxed by stimulating it to over-production. It invariably made the effort demanded of it, and it invariably broke down in the attempt, and died afterwards from sheer exhaustion, like a worn-out cab-horse.

of the rain and the coolness.

It puzzles plants, or at least subjects them to trials, to move them out of their latitudes, and sometimes the effects are very curious. The peach has been brought from the gardens of Kurdistan to those of the Mediterranean, of Europe generally, and of the far West, and, curiously enough, it still persists, like its congeners the apricot and almond, in putting forth blossoms dangerously early in the spring, though it cannot do so with impunity, except under artificial

covering of glass, or at least of fir of solar heat, do not need the alternation. boughs, and other gardener's devices. The rule of life with plants, is the habit The period of flowering, like that of they acquire under the circumstances sleeping, becomes habitual, and some- that surround them. This is practically times exceedingly persistent; and of recognized when chestnuts, ripened in course the flowering and coming into our southern counties, are preferred by leaf of a plant are merely the visible signs planters of the chestnut underwoods in that the torpor of the colder months has Kent, to foreign seed, which would propassed, and that their vital functions duce plants of more tender habit. The have recommenced. Our white clover, seeds of the Scotch fir, ripened in the like the peach, retains its habits through Highlands, would be preferred for their life, and when settled as an emigrant hardihood, to those ripened in warmer among the plants of sub-tropical Ala- districts; and in endeavoring to extend bama, it is observed to awaken in spring, the northern range of a plant, as in the after a brief winter rest, much earlier case of a forage plant (the Holcus sacchathan the more drowsy native clovers. ratus) in this country, it was considered a But the Bermuda grass, transported to great point to get it to ripen a few seeds Alabama from beneath the blazing sun which might be expected to produce an of the plains of the Ganges, is particu- acclimatized variety. larly late in rising. The early habits of The bread grains have a certain habit the Alpine plants are admirable, as in the as to the amount of heat they require to case of the saxifrages, and others of the ripen them. Maize and rice have both same habit. Plants are accommodating been ripened on the banks of the Thames, on the whole, but they may all be said to but they are out of their latitude, as wine rest, according to their special habit, at is, and as perhaps the sugar beet is, in certain temperatures, and they vegetate this country. Wheat gets rapidly out of sluggishly at certain higher temperatures. bounds in crossing the border counties, Natives of cool climates, on the other beyond which the oats are the bread corn hand, may be killed in a hot country by of the people. But while a certain equaexcessive heat, or they may be only ble temperature may not stimulate the checked, or thrown into leafy growth, if plant beyond the point at which it prothey are perennials, or changed into win- duces leaves and barren flowers, and ter growers if they are annuals. Flax is while the sum of heat received, in a northa summer crop in Russia and a winter ern latitude, in six or seven months, may crop in Egypt, being brought to maturity fail to ripen a particular grain, the same by a certain amount of heat which it ob- total amount of heat received in a shorter tains there in the winter. The vine is time, in a southern latitude, may cause rather particular, and is killed by cold in maturation. This is exceedingly inconNorth-eastern Europe, and, like wheat, venient in some countries, where the orand other plants of temperate or warm-dinary crop is produced in summer, while temperate zones, it runs to waste, and bears no fruit in the hotter zones. The two plants are not altogether barred from the tropics, but their habit of growth is deranged, and they become leafy, fruitless, and seedless. Both wheat and the grape-vine-the one a cosmopolitan grass, the other a trailer, which has twined round There is a curious passage in Lord Bathe world-can bear great heat, provided con's writings where he discourses upon it is alternated with cold; but having be-the juices of plants and the theory of heat come habituated to the winter rest of their native climes and countries, the perpetual motion of their sap exhausts them in the end, though at first it throws them into leafy and abnormal growth.

Alternation is the law of plant life in temperate regions. The torpor of the colder months is necessary to the activity of the growing period. There is no reason in nature why it should be so, and in fact, the evergreens of the tropics, being accustomed to a more equal distribution

the winter's sun is utilized for some quick, imported crop, as in the case of flax in Egypt. A very short interval between spring and summer ripens the hardier cereals, such as barley and bere, at their polar limits, because the summer sun has great power while it lasts.

and dryness, and accounts for the earlier or later flowering of different species by the greater or less degree of moisture in them. Fanciful as this language and antiquated as this theory may seem, the great philosopher whose speculations preceded the investigations into the laws of physiology and morphology which have since been aided by the microscope, rightly surmised, quite in accordance with the later developments of science, that the relative activity of the organs, at

the ground, and let the grass grow green and rank in the depths of the forest?

different temperatures, was dependent on the qualities of the juices contained in the vessels; which qualities are imparted Who can trace all the causes that unby the character of the climate. The derlie what is called habit in those plants unit of life is an atom, and on the atoms which clothe the great central belt of the are written, so to speak, the various laws earth with perpetual green? The ever which give diverse characters and quali-open page of nature satisfies the spirit of ties to plants. Climate settles a great many other matters besides the hours of work and rest.

"From the extremes of climate," says Buffon, "we draw our drugs, perfumes, and poisons, and all the plants whose properties are in excess. Temperate climates, on the contrary, only produce temperate things; the mildest of herbs, the most wholesome of vegetables, the most refreshing of fruits, the quietest of animals, the most polished of men, are the heritage of the mildest climates."

inquiry within certain limits, and if we have seemed of late years to come near to an interpretation of some of the general laws under which the forms of life around us have changed with our surrounding circumstances, let us be careful not to overvalue our achievements. The ultimate cause of the formative forces of nature, and the mystery of that original impress which was stamped on the units, or atoms of life, by the Former of the Universe, we cannot comprehend.

From The Academy.

THE BRUNSWICK ONYX VASE.

Mexico is typical of orchids, says the translator of Figuier's "Vegetable Kingdom;" but he ought rather to have reversed the saying, since it is the plants which are the types of the country, representing its climate and characteristics, DR. FIEDLER, of Wesel, recently adand stamping upon them the "aspects of dressed a letter to the Allgemeine Zeitung, nature," so far as vegetation is concerned. in which he gives an interesting account Consequently, there are plants for all of the Brunswick onyx vase, whose nukinds of sites, saxifrages for the declivi- merous hair-breadth escapes from capture ties of Chimborazo, and palms, bamboos, and destruction might supply materials and arborescent grasses for the plains of capable of adaptation for many a thrilling the Orinocos. Or if we take geographical | tale of startling vicissitudes, adventurous space and travel from the equator towards wanderings, and critical turns of fate. the poles, we shall pass from the cocoa- What had been the destiny of this nonpanut and plantain groves of the tropics to reil before the seventeenth century, where the spongy masses of sphagna, or bog-it saw the light, and who fashioned it in mosses, which cover whole countries in the northern regions of snow and ice. The intermediate space is too wide for us to attempt to map it out with a description of the great nations of vegetables, within whose boundaries are subordinate tribes and races, more various and more distinct than the great races of mankind that people the kingdoms and principalities of the earth. The broad distinctions between the great families of plants, are as easy to trace as the difference of colour in a negro and a white man; but there are shades of difference in the habit of plants which are inherent and obscure in their origin, like the shades of character in men. It is easy to say that equatorial vegetation is evergreen, and that the leaves are shed occasionally instead of periodically, because there is no cessation of growth, and because vegetation is not arrested by cold; but who can account for the anomalies of Australian foliage, the pale green hues of the trees, and their vertical leaves that cast no shadow on

all its incomparable beauty, are questions which have hitherto baffled enquiry. All we know is that when, in the year 1630, the city of Mantua was captured, after many months' siege, by the imperialists, Duke Francis Albert of Saxe-Lauenburg, who commanded an Austrian contingent, noticed this now far-famed vase in the hands of one of his soldiers, and purchased it for 100 ducats from the man, who valued it only for the gold of which its foot and handle were formed. The soldier, when questioned about it, related that during the three days' plunder to which the city had been subjected, he and a companion had made a raid on some of the apartments of the royal palace, and observing the gold on the vase, he had snatched it up, and carried it away as part of his share of the booty. This palace had been the favourite residence of Vincenzo II., Duke of Mantua, and head of the great art-loving family of the Gonzagas, whose death without direct heirs in 1627 had drawn upon the unhappy Mantuans the war

which laid waste their fair city, and which | Soon a paper war disturbed the atmosoriginated in the claims advanced by the phere of German academic literature, Emperor Ferdinand II. on the duchy, in which reached its height in an angry reright of his empress the sister of Vincenzo. From the possession of Francis Albert of Saxe-Lauenburg, who was a connoisseur in art, and recognized in his newly-acquired treasure a genuine antique, it passed to his widow, who left it by will to her sister, the Princess Sophia Elizabeth, wife of August, reigning Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

tort by Eggeling, entitled Abstersio Fellerianarum Calumniarum atque acerbissimarum Injuriarum (Bremae, 1689); but which left the question of the real significance of the bas-reliefs undecided.

The monetary value of the treasure seemed to have been nearly as difficult of determination as the subject of its decorations, and in the inventories of the ducal pretiosa it fluctuated between 60,000 and 160,000 Reichs-thaler. In the beginning of the eighteenth century an attempt was made by the then possessors (the widow of Duke Ferdinand Albert and her sons) to find a purchaser for the vase, in order to give the Princess Sophia Eleonora of Brunswick the sixth part of the purchasemoney in part payment of her dowry, in accordance with her father's intentions;

petitor for the prize, and the onyx cup, after a prolonged public but carefully guarded exhibition, was restored to its own iron chest, which was only to be unlocked in the presence of a high Court official.

By this lady it was bequeathed as an inalienable heirloom to her son, Duke Ferdinand Albert, the Marvellous, whose zeal in collecting rare and costly works of art made him a fitting recipient for such a trust. By his directions a green satin case, bound with silver cord, was made for the vase, which was further secured from risk of injury by being enclosed in a padlocked and strongly-made wooden case, covered with silk and gold and sil-but no one presented himself as a comver lace. What is of more interest to us, he also caused the learned secretary, Eggeling of Bremen, to write an explanatory treatise in Latin on the goblet, and its mode of decoration. From this composition, entitled Mysteria Cereris et Bacchi in vasculo ex uno onyche, &c. (Bremae, 1682, quarto), we learn that the vase is fashioned out of a genuine and precious gem, known as onyx, or sardonyx, and provided with a pure and massive wrought gold cover, spout, handle, and foot. Independently of these metallic additions, the vase measures about 5 3-4 inches in length, and about three inches in breadth. The ingenious workman who prepared the gem for its present adaptation has secured strength and cohesion for the entire mass by passing two hoops of gold around it in connection with the handle and spout, and has thus divided the surface into three compartments, in the central one of which the artist has drawn twelve figures, which are cut into the stone in bas relief, and represent a sacrificial or other ceremonial connected with some religious mysteries. The upper division is decorated with appropriate emblems of fruit, leaves, heads of bulls, &c., while the lowermost compartment exhibits goblets, fruit-baskets, torches, serpents, and two human heads.

In 1766, after having been the joint. property of the Brunswick and Bevern branches of the family, it became the sole possession of the reigning ducal line, and thenceforth it followed the chequered fortunes of those princes. After the battle of Jena, in 1806, in which Duke Charles William of Brunswick was mortally wounded, the onyx vase passed with the fugitive family from Lübeck to Sweden, next from Als to Slesvig, and was at length deposited at Glücksburg, whence, however, from fear of Danish interference and in imminent peril of being seized by the French, it was conveyed to England by Colonel Von Nordenfels, whose perils by sea from privateers, and dangers by land from hostile armies, would fill a volume. Napoleon was at that very time turning a longing eye on the Mantuan onyx, and in return for its possession he is said to have offered to remit half a milllon francs of the war indemnity in which poor Brunswick was mulcted, but in vain; the family clung with hereditary tenacity to their precious treasure, and Eggeling's learned treatise was met by refused to listen to the tempter. On Dea counterblast of rhetoric from Dr. Feller, cember 23d, 1810, Colonel Nordenfels, Professor of Poetry at Leipzig, and libra-attended by a faithful servant, left Glücksrian to the University, who declared that the figures referred to the Eleusinian mysteries, and were not Bacchanalian in character, as the secretary had asserted.

burg, and after passing through Prussia and Sweden to disarm suspicion, assuming disguises of every kind, and having to endure detention, delays, and interrogations

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