Scientific Intelligence. — Botany. 387 



East India Possessions. As precursory to this work, he pu- 

 blished, at Batavia, a View of the Vegetable Kingdom of Java, in 

 Fifteen Parts. 



27. Common Sugar existing in the form of grains in the 

 floivers of' Rhododendron ponticurn. — M. Jaeger discovered, in 

 April 1825, on a plant of Rhododendron ponticum, which he kept 

 in his room, and which was covered with flowers, grains of com- 

 mon sugar, pure and of a white colour, on the inner surface of 

 the upper division of the corolla. The quantity of grains col- 

 lected from about 140 flowers amounted to 275 centigrammes. 

 The mean weight of each grain was two centigrammes. The 

 physical and chemical properties of these grains approach so much 

 to those of common sugar, that no essential difference could be 

 detected between the two substances. 



28. On the Cotton of the Ancients. — The synonymy of the 

 vegetables known to the ancients, is one of the most difficult 

 points of science to establish, and is a continual subject of re- 

 gret, especially when reference is made to vegetables, which 

 have been extensively employed. M. Mongez has therefore 

 rendered a service to science, by clearing up this part of the his- 

 tory of cotton, in a memoir lately published. Two very diffe- 

 rent vegetables have been confounded under the name of cotton, 

 the Bombax and the Gossypium or cotton tree. It is the 

 former of these that was designated by Herodotus, as well as 

 by Strabo, who relates, that the Macedonians employed in Ba- 

 bylonia, the down of the tree which bears wool to make hous- 

 ings for horses. Theophrastus speaks of both. The substance 

 which Virgil mentions as fabricated by the seres^ is the cotton 

 which came from Bactiia, called serique. The Gossypium was 

 only cultivated in Egypt after the time of the Ptolemies ; in the 

 Western Morea, in the second century. Asia and Persia, among 

 other countries, already possessed very celebrated manufactures 

 of cotton. It was used as a substitute for papyrus, and the 

 parchment which succeeded it, until it was itself replaced by 

 paper made from flax and hemp. The word cotton evidently 

 comes from g'hotten^ by which the Arabians, wlio cultivated this 

 vegetable before the commencement of our era, designated it, 

 and from Cottonara (now Canora), a country on the coast of 

 Malabar, from which the Arabians and Egyptians carried it in- 

 to their respective countries. 



