erected, suited to the increasing stores of curious objects brought together here. The present rooms contain a good selection of seeds, dried grasses, fruits, gums, roots, and wood; together with specimens of the uses to which they are applied. They are placed in glass cases, ranged along the middle of the building, and against

the walls.

As we enter, we find a large and singular collection of pine-cones, from the size of boys' marbles to that of a horse's head, The hard scales are the fruit of the tree, and contain the seed. Formerly cones were much used in medicine, though they are not now in repute. Just by are some gourds, which have been turned to good account in the bottles and snuffboxes made from them. In a small glass is a variety of apples of Sodom. These are a sort of galls, and, like all galls, arise from eggs laid by little flies. When an egg is laid in a stem or a leaf of a tree, the part swells into a kind of tumour. The egg soon sends out a caterpillar, which finds a house and food within, until it eats its way out and escapes as a winged insect. The outside of the gall when on the tree looks like a small red apple, but the inside is full of dust. Many a thirsty traveller has been tempted by the glossy and rich exterior to bite the apple, and has filled his mouth, not with a refreshing fruit, but with the bitter and black ashes of the inside. The trees which, produce these galls grow near the Dead Sea, as well as other parts; and as the wicked city of Sodom once stood on the spot, its name has been given to them. A large number of other galls are in the Museum, of different shapes,

sizes, and colour, brought from several parts of the world. From one kind, writing-ink is made. How much are we indebted to the little creatures which make these galls on the trees and shrubs, and thus enable us to converse with our absent friends!

But if insects aid us in some things, in others they do not appear to so much advantage. Here are specimens of timber which they have filled with holes through the hardest parts. They have most strangely eaten their way, and the lines they have formed are quite a picture. By the side of the wood are laid the little insect depredators. The white ants of India have destroyed chests of drawers, and other articles of furniture; and the planks of many a noble ship have been so destroyed by another kind of tiny insect, as to cause it to founder beneath the deep waters.

or

That case of gutta percha is sure to catch the eye. Here are the wood and the gumthe material just as it comes to England, and the various articles into which it is made. At first, it was used for soles of shoes; it is now turned to account for finer and more namental purposes: picture-frames, flowerstands, car-trumpets, cups, dishes, and a hundred other things are moulded from it, and some of them in forms the most beautiful. Little did the worthy physician who brought the first piece of gutta percha to England, imagine, that in a short time it would be well known throughout the land, and regarded as one of the most valuable vegetable substances possessed by man.

In one place, we see a group of skeletons of

leaves their minute and delicate forms most tastefully arranged; and in another, a variety of similar skeletons made to look as if fashioned of gold and silver, by the process called electrotyping.

As we pass our eye in a new direction, we observe fancy mats made of Irish rye-straw, by female peasants in the county of Wexford, Ireland; also wheat-straw curiously platted in twenty various ingenious ways. Cocoa-nut fibre made into brushes, mats, ropes, baskets, cloth, hats, and bonnets; with the shells of the nut shaped into drinking-cups and pots. Teas-black, grey, and green-from Assam, and China; with brick-tea, like small cheeses, from Thibet. Vases, jars, and pans, which are made from the ground bark of the pottery tree, and may be put upon the hottest fire without cracking, might well pass for brown earthenware. Tobacco in leaf, or made into cigars, from Turkey, Florida, Havanna, Virginia, and other parts of the earth. There, too, are yellow wood, brown fustic, green and black ebony. Madder, saffron, and numerous other dye-stuffs, from which we obtain our brightest and brilliant, as well as our more sober colours, for the use of dyers and painters.

Now we are tempted to gaze upon a group of articles made of vegetable ivory, from New Grenada, which, for beauty, rival those carved from the finest elephants' tusks. Here is the head-dress of a Tahitian lady: the band or fillet for the brows is formed of the inner bark of the tree Hibiscus, while from it flows the curls to spread over the shoulders, cut from the cuticle or skin of a young cocoa-nut. The

whole is most delicate and graceful, and is worthy to stand by the side of a coronet of gold and diamonds. The rice-paper, in that case, is fashioned into a bunch of flowers; and in another, the lace-bark from Jamaica and Cuba exhibits some beautiful forms. In one place are table-mats and baskets made of grass, from the northern clime of Labrador; and in another, similar articles from the hot countries of the East. Cane baskets, bark canoes, mulberry-tree cloth, India-rubber shoes, and strong linen for tent-coverings from a species of palm tree, claim at least a notice as we pass along the room.

Let us stop for a few minutes and inspect these natural sacks from Bombay, made by simply peeling off in a piece the bark of a tree, and then turning it inside out; one of these sacks is long enough to hold a little boy, and a second is more suited to a soldier six feet high. Here is a towel-gourd, used as wadding for guns, and also as a cloth or towel; and there a club-gourd, large enough to knock a man to the ground. In one place are several lumps of monkey-bread; and in another, the coarse bread commonly eaten by the natives of Van Diemen's Land. From China there are the berries of the tallow-plant, which yield a substance largely used by the natives for candles, as well as the candle-wick tree from the same country, the pith serving for the wick. Then, equally strange to us, there are the shells of the cannon-ball tree, perhaps so called from their shape, or because in the silence of the night they are often heard to explode with a noise like that of a gun.

We should find no great difficulty here in bringing together, from many lands, the materials for a good breakfast, though some of it might be rather new to the taste. There is the bread-fruit from the South Sea Islands; and shea butter, made from the kernels of a tree that grows on the river Niger in Africa. A bottle of milk drawn from the cow-tree, and a loaf of dried cream from the milk-tree of Mexico. Coffee from Arabia, and beet-root sugar in cakes of the purest white; or, if we prefer it, moist sugar from the maple tree, like cakes of brown soap. And, if we wish to make the fire burn more quickly, there is in a case in the corner a pair of vegetable bellows, made of the leaves of a tree from a remoto part of India, and with which the natives can give blasts strong enough to melt bars of iron. Cups and saucers, plates and pots, together with a nice white table-cloth, may be obtained from the different vegetable productions around us. As we are not likely, however, to sit down to such a breakfast, except in fancy, we will proceed in our inspection of the rooms.

But we cannot notice a quarter of the curi ous and useful productions to be seen in this Museum. Drugs and spices of all kinds; starch and gums; beans and peas, in pod and out of pod; corn-plants, grasses, and seaweeds from lands east, west, north, and south; reeds, shaped into pipes and walking-sticks; bamboos, from which drinking-cups, musical instruments, bows, and arrows are strangely formed; singular looking tree-ferns from China; cotton in seed, leaf, and flower, with the yarn and cloth made from its fibres; flax