like pieces that melt away in the mouth, and these troches are esteemed by many persons as stomachics and corroborants.

(4917.) RAFFLESIACE E. The plants associated to form this group are as yet but partially and imperfectly known. They are all more or less astringent: the Rafflesia Arnoldi is said to be a most powerful styptic. In Java it is used medicinally to arrest morbid discharges, and its effects are said to be very decided; but the physiological interest of these plants far exceeds their direct economical or medicinal value; and the stupendous Rafflesia Arnoldi, or Krúbút, has not inappropriately been called the "Vegetable Titan." [See fig. § 111.] This gigantic flower, well named Ambun Ambun, wonder-wonder, or flower of flowers, by the natives, was discovered in the year 1818, when Sir Stamford Raffles, then Governor of Sumatra, made his first excursion from Bencoolen into the interior of the island. In that journey he was accompanied by a naturalist of great zeal and acquirements, the late Dr. Joseph Arnold, a member of the Linnean Society, from whose researches, aided by the friendship and influence of the governor, in a field so favorably situated and so imperfectly traversed as Sumatra, the greatest expectations had been formed. But these expectations were never to be realized; for the same letter which gave us the first account of the gigantic flower brought also the intelligence of Dr. Arnold's death. This letter was one from Sir Stamford Raffles to Sir Joseph Banks; and in it was enclosed the following extract, in the handwriting of the lamented Arnold, which formed part of an epistle (left unfinished) to some unknown friend, in which he gives a lively account of the discovery of this, which Sir Stamford Raffles well denominated "most magnificent flower." After describing the previous route, Arnold thus continues:

"At Pulo-Lebbar, on the Manna River, two days' journey inland of Manna, I rejoice to tell you I happened to meet with what I consider the greatest prodigy of the vegetable world. I had ventured some way before the party, when one of the Malay servants came running to me, with wonder in his eyes, and said, 'Come with me, sir, come and see a flower, very large-beautiful-wonderful!' I immediately went with the man about a hundred yards into the jungle, and he pointed to a flower growing close to the ground under the bushes, which was truly astonishing. My first impulse was to cut it up, and carry it to the hut. I therefore seized the Malay's parang (a sort of instrument like a woodman's chopping-hook), and finding that it sprang from a small root which ran horizontally (about as large as two fingers, or a little more), I soon detached it, and removed it to our hut. To tell you the truth, had I been alone, and had there been no witnesses, I should, I think, have been fearful of mentioning the dimensions of this flower, so much does it exceed every flower I have ever seen or heard of; but I had Sir Stamford and Lady Raffles with me, and a Mr. Palsgrave, a respectable man, resident at Manna, who, though equally astonished with myself, yet are able to testify as to the truth.

"The whole flower was of a very thick substance, the petals and nectary being in but few places less than a quarter of an inch thick, and in some places three quarters of an inch; the substance of it was very succulent. When I first saw it, a swarm of flies were hovering over the mouth of the nectary, and apparently laying their eggs in the substance of it; it had precisely the smell of tainted beef. "Now for the dimensions, which are the most astonishing part of the flower. It measured a full yard across; the petals, which were subrotund, being 12 inches

from the base to the apex, and it being a foot from the insertion of the one petal to the opposite one; Sir Stamford, Lady Raffles, and myself, taking immediate measures to be accurate in this respect, by pinning four large sheets of paper together, and cutting them the precise size of the flower. The nectarium, in the opinion of us all, would hold twelve pints, and the weight of this prodigy we calculated to be fifteen pounds!

"A guide from the interior of the country said that such flowers were rare, but that he had seen several, and that the natives call them Krúbút."

Later information has shewn that the Krúbút, or great flower, is much more generally known to the Sumatrese than its first European discoverers suspected; for in subsequent letters from Sir S. Raffles and Mr. Jack are the following passages:

"I find the Krûbut, or great flower, to be much more general and extensively known than I expected. In some districts it is simply called Ambun Ambun. It takes three months from the first appearance of the bud to the full complete expansion of the flower; and the flower appears but once a year, at the conclusion of the rainy season. It has no stem of its own, but is parasitic on the roots and stems of a ligneous species of cissus, with ternate and quinate leaves (Cissus angustifolia.) It appears to take its origin in some crack or hollow of the stem, and soon shews itself in the form of a round knob, which, when cut through, exhibits the infant flower, enveloped in numerous bracteal sheaths, which successively open and wither, until, at the time of its fulness of growth, but very few remain ; the blossoms rot away not long after their expansion, and the seeds or spores are dispersed throughout the pulpy mass."

This giant flower may well indeed be esteemed the wonder of the vegetable world; and, although several others similar to it in form and habit have been

(a) Entire flower.

Rafflesia Patma.

(b) Section of a bud beginning to expand. (c) Another, before expansion.

found, none have as yet been discovered that equal Arnold's flower in size. A small species has been mentioned by Dr. Horsfield; but his flower, instead of measuring three feet across, only measured three inches. A second very magni

ficent species, measuring two feet in diameter, has been discovered in a small island near Java, called Nusa Kambangar; and this has been figured by Blume in his Flora Javæ, from which the accompanying representation is a copy. By the natives it is called Patma; and hence the botanical name proposed for it is Rafflesia Patma. Another of these vegetable paradoxes, figured also by Blume, is a native of the province of Buitenzorg, in the western parts of Java, and grows at the height of from 1200 to 1500 feet above the level of the sea. He has called it Brugmansia Zippeli; the generic term is however untenable, as a genus separated from Datura [§ 4512] had previously been dedicated to Brugmans, and received his name.

(4918.) These fungoid flowers, which so curiously combine the most essentially diverse structures, close the descriptive part of these general Outlines; for, after having in the preceding classes traced the development and gradual perfecting of the vegetable organismus, and followed the several stages of evolution, from the cellular and seedless through the tubivascular and seed-bearing plants, a return is made, in the Cytinales, from the 2-lobed and 1-lobed Exogene and Endogenæ, even to the acotyledonous cellulares, viz. to that part of the series whence the earliest examples were taken, and with which the details were begun. For, although the Rafflesia consist of blossom only, yet in them the characters of a flower are almost extinct. The bud resembles a fungus, the pericarp becomes a peridium, and the seeds assume the condition of spores. Indeed, the parasitic habits and general appearance of these plants and their allies, Cynomorium, Helosis, and Balanophora, might well lead to their approximation to the fungi, and vindicate for the latter its specific name, fungosa, and for the former its old appellations of Fungus Typhoides vel Melitensis, the Maltese champignon, or mushroom of Malta.

(4919.) The subdivisions of this class are so few, that, excepting for the sake of obedience to the hitherto unbroken rule of concluding the details of each with a conspectus, it would scarcely be necessary to repeat them in a tabular form.

GEOGRAPHICAL AND GEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS.

(4920.) The SELANTHI, or Cytinares, belong exclusively to warm countries; they are chiefly natives of the torrid zone in either hemisphere, sometimes, however, being found at considerable elevations, and occasionally, as in the case of Cytinus and Cynomorium, extending as far north as the southern parts of Europe. Helosis and Langsdorfia are natives of the West Indies, or Continental America within the tropics; Aphyteia of equinoctial Africa; Balanophora of the New Hebrides; and the Rafflesia have hitherto been only found in Java and Sumatra.

(4921.) Hence their distribution assumes rather a local than a general character, a special than a general interest. Like the Fungi, to which they bear

such strange similitude, the Selanthi are unknown in a fossil state. The coincidence is worthy of remark; for this negative fact, although it at once prevents any special geological disquisitions, is not without its value in more general researches into the present and former conditions of the vegetable world.

(4922.) Having concluded the separate histories of the nine natural classes into which plants have been divided, and appended to the descriptive details of each, their geographical distribution and geological positions, as far as either have been hitherto determined, it only now remains to give a general summary of the relative proportions in which they occur in the several great divisions of the world, i. c. of the vegetable statistics of the several zones.

(4923.) The five zones with which geographers encircle the globe, although very arbitrary divisions of its surface, and the parallels of latitude, although very often discordant with the isothermal lines which indicate the mean temperature or actual climate of different regions, are still, from their universal acceptation, the most convenient demarcations for general reference; and, notwithstanding their frequent deviations from the climatorial belts, they are yet sufficiently coincident for general statistical considerations, which are all with which we at present are concerned; the absolute numbers and the relative proportions in which the different tribes of plants spontaneously occur, or are cultivated by art in any particular region or country, forming a part of the natural history of that spot, or of the special vegetable statistics of that individual place.

(4924.) Of the 50,000 known species of existing vegetables, the cellular flowerless plants being estimated at 8 or 10,000, and the flowering or tubivascular ones at upwards of 40,000, of which the endogenous tribes may amount to 9 or 10,000, and the exogenous ones to more than 30,000, it would appear that between 20 and 25,000, i. e. about half of all known vegetables, are natives of the torrid zone. Of these it has been computed that upwards of 13,000 flowering plants are indigenous to equinoctial America, between 5 and 6,000 to equatorial Asia, and about 3,500 to Africa within the tropics, including both the continental countries and the dependent isles. In Australia and the islands of the Pacific about 5,000 species have been discovered, some of which belong to the torrid and some to the temperate zone. Besides these, nearly 2,000 belong to the temperate parts of Asia, above 4,000 to the temperate regions of America, both in the northern and southern hemispheres, and 7,000 to Europe, most of which are proper to its temperate latitudes, and very few to its polar regions. Of the antarctic vegetation there is next to nothing known.

(4925.). The Cryptogamic, or flowerless cellular plants, have been purposely left out of the previous calculations, for they are almost peculiar to the circumpolar regions and the colder parts of the temperate zones. The Protococci, which alternate in layers with the arctic snows; the Lichens, which cover the polar rocks; the Mosses, which flourish within the frigid zone, are all but absent from the intertropical regions; and the Conferva, with which the icy waters of Lapland, and Sweden, and Scotland abound, and which, although plentiful in Britain, and the colder parts of the north temperate regions, yet gradually become more scarce in the southern ones, in the equatorial latitudes are almost unknown; the Fuci being the chief representatives of these tribes within the tropics: and even Fungi,

the most vagrant of all vegetables, and which in high latitudes are so extraordinarily abundant, so numerous in their species, and so profuse in individual production, are rare in lower ones, and from countries near the equator they are almost or altogether absent.

(4926.) In the stead, however, of Confervæ, lichens, and mosses, equinoctial vegetation consists of palms and arboreous ferns, of arborescent grasses and treelike Musacea; the dense and interminable forests are formed of gigantic evergreen trees, to which belong the myrtle, the nutmeg, the clove, the turpentine, and the coffee tribes: instead of woodbines; there are peppers and passion-flowers: instead of sedges; ginger, cardamom, zedoary: and, instead of parasitic fungi, epiphytic Orchidinæ. The Malvacea, the Euphorbiacea, the Urticaceae, and even the Composita and Gramina, become arborescent; so that within the torrid zone there are few rich pasture lands, thick and almost impenetrable jungles displacing our rich boundless meadows and daisy-spangled meads.

(4927.) In the temperate zones, as the distance gradually increases from the equator, the forest-trees become deciduous; the olive and the grape are less and less common, until at length oil and wine are superseded, as common articles of human food, by beer and butter; the bamboos and rigid grasses give way to more tender species; the arborescent mallows, euphorbias, and nettles, become shrubs, and subsequently herbs; the Orchises leave their aerial and epiphytic sites, and vegetate in the ordinary soil, and mosses and lichens occupy their stations on old or decaying trees; the fresh waters abound with Confervæ; and dead vegetables are covered with fungi.

(4928.) As the latitudes increase, the richness and abundance of the vegetation decreases. In the north temperate zone, the forests consist of birch, alder, willow, and fir, instead of the plane, the bread-fruit, and the mimosa; many trees and shrubs become herbaceous plants, so that wood either for building or fuel is scarcely known; and, although the grasses long strive against increasing cold, substituting one species for another as an approach is made towards the pole, they at length give way to lichens, which in Lapland and Iceland cover the boundless wastes, affording forage and pasture to the flocks and herds. In such situations, the words corn, and wine, and oil, are strange unmeaning sounds, or the names of foreign delicacies, of which travellers may have told, but which, to the common people, are any thing but ordinary articles of food.

(4929.) Such are some of the more general features of the vegetation in these several zones. Of the varied predominance of the different classes in each there is sufficient proof, but of their relative proportions the calculations are not complete. The following are some of the ratios made out with much labour by Humboldt, De Candolle, Brown, and others.

(4930.) Of 3880 flowering plants found within the tropics of the New World by Humboldt and Bonpland, 3226 were dicotyledonous, and 654 monocotyledonous; and the above, although only a third or a fourth, may be taken as a fair average of the whole. Of the monocotyledons, the Palmales and Musales, with the perigynous part of the Liliales, are much more frequent within than without the tropics; and the Juncales, with the hypogynous Liliales, are more common in extra- than intra-tropical latitudes. Hence, within the tropics of America, the monocotyledons are to the dicotyledons as 1 to 5; in equinoctial Asia, Africa, and Australia, the proportion is, according to the calculations of Brown, as 1