26 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
which are used in much the same manner as the sweet pota- 
toes. The seeds are also used in confectionery. About 1876 
the Hindoo lotus was introduced commercially into this coun- 
try where it has now become naturalized. 
According to the botanists, Pickering, Pleyte, Joret, and 
Schweinfurth, and the archeologist, Wilkinson, the Hindoo 
sacred lotus (Nelumbo) is never found in the ancient Egyp- 
tian monuments. Furthermore, it does not seem to have been 
known in Egypt before the advent of the Persians who un- 
doubtedly introduced it into the Nile region. All of the evi- 
dence goes to prove that the ‘‘sacred lotus’’ of the Egyptians 
was a true water-lily native to the Nile Valley and Delta. 
Two species of water-lily are figured on the monuments and 
tombs of ancient Egypt, one, a white night-blooming species 
(Nymphaca Lotus), and the other, a blue day-blooming lily 
(Nymphaea caerulea). Of these, the night-blooming type oc- 
curs much more frequently. Pleyte found the white ‘‘lotus”’ 
only on a single tomb belonging to the twelfth dynasty. 
Schweinfurth, during his researches in 1883-1884, found 
petals of the white lily mingled with those of the blue in the 
funeral wreaths of Ramses II and Amenhotep I, but he never 
cbserved any carving or picture of the plant. 
The use of flowers in funeral decorations seems to have 
been very prominent in the nineteenth and twenty-first dynas- 
ties. The custom was to lay wreaths and semicircles of flowers 
on the breast of the enwrapped corpse until the sarcophagus 
was almost entirely packed with the floral tributes. Schwein- 
furth found flowers of Nymphaea caerulea upon stems 18-20 
inches long fastened between the bands encircling the mum- 
mies of Ramses II and the priest Nisboni. <A breast wreath 
from the coffin of Ramses II was illustrated in ‘‘Nature,”’ 
1885, and consists of foliage leaves of Mimusops Schimperi 
folded two or four times and fastened to petals of Nymphaea 
caerulea with fibers of the date-palm in such a manner that 
the petals were held and clamped without being pierced ; these 
were again strung upon strips of date-palm leaves (pl. 5, fig. 
5). The flowers and leaves in this wreath were as perfect as 
if newly dried, and consequently, by soaking them in water, 
Schweinfurth was able to identify them beyond doubt. The 
two varieties of water-lilies observed on carvings may be dis- 
tinguished from each other by the leaf characters. Since the 
leaves of the blue species are entire and its petals acute, while 
the white species has sharply dentate or toothed leaf margins 
