186 BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
we have here a combination of all the conditions required for a grand 
botanic establishment; and such the Valencia garden will become, if 
Carbonell’s life is spared and his rectorship continued. I will, in 
conclusion, specify some of the rarities in the garden; rarities, at 
least, as concern the individual specimens. The large water basin is 
filled with tropical aquatics, such as several plants of Nelumbium 
speciosum in full bloom at the time I speak of (August), and remark- 
able on account of the great size of the flowers and leaves. In the 
open air grow small trees of Gleditschia caspica, the stem of which 
is armed with compound spines a span long ; Parkinsonia aculeata ; 
Araucaria excelsa and imbricata ; and a splendid specimen of Fucca fila- 
mentosa, with a stem eight feet high and nearly one foot thick. The 
Parkinsonia is a layer from an old large tree, which was ignorantly 
cut down by the Canon Carrascosa, formerly director of the agro- 
nomical garden, now united with the botanic garden. The Chame- 
rops humilis, which so much astonished me in 1844, is fortunately 
still in existence, and it measures nearly twenty feet in height. 
The proper “botanical school” remains still a Linnean arrange- 
ment, but it is intended to put it in order according to the natural 
system. May the Valencia garden continue its progress towards per- 
fection, and serve as a praiseworthy pattern of imitation for all the 
other botanical establishments in Spain ! 
. Observations upon the elevated temperature of the male inflorescence of 
CycADEOUS PLANTS; communicated by Dv. W. H. DE VRIESE, 
Professor of Botany and Director of the Royal mae of the Uni- 
versity of Leyden. 
All living bodies have a temperature peculiar to themselves ; that is 
to say, they have a temperature different from, and independent of, 
those that surround them. This temperature is intimately connected 
with their nature, and is modified according to the different conditions 
in which they may be. ` This necessary consequence of the successive 
changes which organic matter undergoes during life, is in its turn one 
of the causes which preserve organized bodies, and by which animal 
and vegetable life are protected from destruction or dissolution, which 
external circumstances would not be long in producing. It is this 
peculiar temperature which permits animals to inhabit regions of the 
