KEW GARDEN MUSEUM. 331 
of Botany, and the services mankind thereby derives from them. It 
has done more to recommend and to popularize (if I may use the expres- 
sion) the science that communicates the knowledge of the vegetable 
ereation, than all the princely Palms, the gorgeous Water-Lilies, the 
elegant Ferns, etc., etc., which grace the tropical houses of these 
noble Gardens. Here (in these Gardens) it is true the public are pri- 
vileged to see growing Plants of 1. the Cocoa-nut ; 2.the Vegetable 
Toory-Palm ; 3. the Wax-bearing Palms of Brazil and of the Andes ; 
4. the Piacaba Palm; 5. the Coco de Mer; 6. the Doum Palm; 1. the 
African Oil-Palm ; 8. the Papaver somniferum; 9. the Bermudian Ju- 
niper ; 10. the Isonandra Gutta ; 11. the Chinese-grass Plant (so called) ; 
12. the Siphonia elastica ; 13. Rice-paper plant (so called) of China; the 
Chocolate, Tea, Coffee, and Sugar-bearing plants, and hundred others of 
equal interest ; but the visitor receives twofold gratification and two- 
fold instruction, if, while these several vegetable forms are fresh in his 
memory, he can enter an adjacent building and there contemplate the 
products of these plants, and see, as it were, the uses which the ingenuity 
of man has derived from them :—1. the food and raiment, the milk, the 
oil, the wine (toddy), the cups and bowls, cordage, brushes, mats, in 
short the 365 articles (as many,” the Hindoos say, “as there are 
days in the year") articles afforded by the common Cocoa-nut alone; 
2. the ivory-like articles made from the seeds of the Vegetable Ivory 
Palm; 3. the excellent and now commercial: wax, yielded by certain 
American Palms, and deposited by nature on the trunk; 4. the useful 
_ huts (for turnery), and still more useful fibre (for the best brooms 
and brushes) of the Piaçaba, as the streets of our great cities can tes- 
tify; 5. the curious double nuts (with their flowers) of the Coco de Mer 
of the Seychelles Islands, once, when they were ignorantly supposed to 
be the product of a submarine tree, and only known from having been 
found floating in the Indian Ocean, valued at the price of a freighted 
ship, being an antidote to all poisons, “ mirum miraculum nature,” says 
Rumphius, “quod princeps est omnium marinarum rerum, que rare 
habentur;" 6. the singularly forked stems (other Palms have un- 
branched stems), and the large gingerbread-tasted fruits of the Doum 
of Upper Egypt; 7. the fruits and nuts of Hlais Guineensis, which yield 
the oil of western tropical Africa, now so largely imported and con- 
sumed by Messrs. Price and Co.; and not those only, but the oil itself 
and the several preparations it undergoes in its progress towards the - 
