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Some 1Rote0 on tbe IDictoria IRcgia. 



By Charles Hoole, assisted by W. Harrow 

 (Curator of Sheffield Botanical Gardens). 



N reading a few short notes on that truly royal 

 genus of the Nymphieacece, or Water-lily family, the 

 Victoria Regia, before a Sheffield audience, I 

 thought it would not be inappropriate to quote a 

 notice from the Horticultural Magazine, as that 

 work was edited by Mr. Robert Marnock, curator 

 •^J7f^^^ of" our Botanical Gardens, and published by the late 

 \?^W^9 Mr. G. Ridge, whose shop in King Street I well 

 remember as a general meeting place of those 

 interested in books and book-making (no allusion to the trade). 

 The extract is from the March No. of 1838, and is as follows; I 

 must ask you to bear in mind that it was written nearly sixty years 

 ago :^" An undoubted addition to a tribe of plants, at once so 

 beautiful and so circumscribed as that of the Nymphs or Water- 

 lilies, would be an event of interest, even if it only related to a 

 distinctly marked species of some well-known genus. But when 

 the discovery is not only a new genus, but a plant of the most 

 extraordinary beauty, fragrant, and of dimensions previously 

 unheard of in the whole vegetable kingdom, except in the collosal 

 family of Palms, an interest must then attach to it which can 

 rarely be possessed by a novelty in natural history. 



" Such a plant is the subject of the following notice : — A 

 Water-lily, exhibiting a new type of structure, of the most noble 

 aspect, of the richest colours, and so gigantic that its leaves 

 measure above eighteen feet and its flowers nearly four feet in 

 circumference, was met with in British Guiana, in lat. 4^ 30' N. 

 and long. 58° W. nearly, by Mr. Robert Schomburgh, a German 

 gentleman, travelling on account of the Royal Geographical 

 Society, assisted by her Majesty's Government, for the purpose of 

 examining the natural productions of that part of the British 

 dominions. In an account of the plant transmitted to the Geo- 

 graphical Society, Mr. Schomburgh speaks thus of the discovery : 



International Journal of Microscopy and Natural Science. 

 Third Series. Vol. VI. p 



