BOTANICAL INFORMATION. | 109 
pure Botany, or more frequently upon medical and rural 
(that is agricultural) Botany. 
. “Tf all these little towns are thus endowed at t the public cost 
with advantages that we cannot obtain for the first city in 
Europe, they all have, in a greater or less degree, those defects 
which are inseparable from small establishments in country 
towns ; but which would. be most easily avoided, did we but 
possess a moderately endowed garden near London, that centre 
of science. The chief disadvantage that attaches to them is 
the want of a Superintendent sufficiently versed in Botany to 
check the nomenclature and correct the errors of the prac- 
tical gardener. ‘Tender.plants die, hardier ones spring up in 
their place and are taken for them; and the consequence 
is, that, in some of the gardens, nearly half the names are 
wrong. There is also a great tendency to encourage and 
perpetuate accidental hybrids and garden varieties, which, 
. however important they may sometimes prove to the Horticul- 
: 
and the species seems altogether much pron 
 turist, are always worse than useless in a Botanical Garden 
intended for instruction. Those institutions appear the most 
serviceable where the aim is to increase genera rather-than - 
species, and among the latter to cultivate chiefly those which 
. have the least similarity to one another, or are the most inter- 
esting from their characters and properties. 
* From Bordeaux to Pau the road crosses a small part of the 
Landes, but I had not time to herborize much. The Pinaster, 
which covers some of the wooded districts, is precisely the 
‘Same as the one growing on so very different a soil on the — — 
Maritime Alps and hills of Southern Provence, and varies, — — 
as in our gardens, in the length of leaf, and depth of colour: 
but is readily distinguished from P. Laricio and other allied 
species, by the cone and facies. The Tauzin Oak, which is. 
here abundant, is a very handsome tree, especially when 
growing with the Quercus pedunculata; the grey foliage of the — 
.. former contrasting well with the bright green of the latter. 
. "This Q. Toza is generally pollarded; but some specimens, left 
to themselves, formed much larger trees than I hadi imagi ec 
