196 wight's botanical letters. 



priate one presentetl itself while perusing the last part of their 

 transactions. In it two sets of experiments are detailed; the 

 first by the excellent old M. Anderson, Curator of the 

 Apothecary Garden, Chelsea, upon some Rice, the produce 

 of the snowy tops of the Himalaya mountains, and from all 

 accounts one of the most hardy of all the varieties of the 

 Cerealia. This proved with him so tender and tropical in its 

 nature, that the summer heat of England was too cold for it; 

 but as he sprouted it in a hot-house, kept it till half grown 

 in a green-house, and then turned it out, only to become 

 hardy after the previous tenderijication — it died, as was to be 

 expected, under the freezing nights of September ; he infers 

 fronj this that England is too cold for Rice, and a committee 

 of the Society of Arts think the same. A Calcutta gentle- 

 man, on the other hand, Iiad been long baffled in all his at- 

 tempts to raise a crop of celery, in the way usually adopted 

 in this country, by sprouting it in a cool shady place; but 

 having got a hot-bed made, he sprouted the seeds on it, and 

 these, when planted out, succeeded far beyond his or any other 

 person's expectation. The object of my paper was to reduce 

 these apparent contradictory experiments to general princi- 

 ples, that could be explained by tlie laws of vegetable life, 

 by showing that Anderson had changed the hardy plants into 

 tropical ones, and that the other had merely done the same ; 

 that consequently the one failed because the seeds were raised 

 in a cold climate, and the other succeeded because they were 

 reared in a hot one. The facts present a most cheering pros- 

 pect to tropical agriculture, since they demonstrate that 

 heat applied to the seed in germination conferred on the 

 plants a tropical property, which, if it was communi- 

 cated to its offspring, there was reason to hope that we 

 might be able in the course of two or three generations 

 to produce a permanent change from hardy to tropical, 

 and thus enable us to introduce into general cultivation 

 in India, all manner of European plants. Such is the cream 

 of my paper. If Wallich gets me a few spare copies, I 

 shall send you one, as I trust it will amuse if not enlighten 



