THE PLANT WORLD. 71 



strongly the idea that these forms are not primarily determined and 

 unalterably fixed. Rather there is in them alono; with a stubborn 

 generic and specific persistance a felicitous molality and pliancy, by 

 means of which they can adjust themselves to the many conditions to 

 which they are subject throughout the earth and change in accordance 

 with them.'' 



In the "Italian Journey," under the date of Padua, September 

 27, 1786, Goethe writes at the time of his visit to the garden: 



'•Many plants can remain in the ground in the winter if they are 

 placed against a wall or not far from it. They cover the whole at 

 the end of October and heat it for a few months. It is delio-htful and 

 instructive to stroll among plants which are strange to us. In time 

 we cease to think at all about those to which we are accustomed as well 

 as about other objects we have long known; but what is seeing without 

 thinking? Here, in this great variety nearly confronting me, the idea 

 became yet more vivid that we could perhaps evolve all the forms of 

 plants from one. By this means alone it would be possible to delimit 

 genera and species which, it seems to me, has heretofore been done in 

 a very arbitrary way. On this point of my botanical philosophy I 

 am at a stand and do not yet see how I shall extricate myself. The 

 depth and the breadth of the matter appear to me about equal. ' ' 



BLOOMING PALMS. 

 By P. Kaufman. 



THE chief attraction at present in our greenhouses in Central 

 Park, is the palm Seafortida elegans^ a native of Australia, 

 Growing on the tropical island, in the main conservatory, it 

 has attained a height of twenty-three feet. Some of its leaves are 

 ten feet in length; the leaflets being linear, about one foot long, and 

 two inches broad at the center or widest part. The flower stem ex- 

 tends horizontally from the middle of the trunk, some distance below 

 the crown of leaves, and bears many long drooping racemes of beauti- 

 ful heliotrope flower buds. 



In another greenhouse we find the Livistona Chinensis, or Chinese 

 Fan Palm, with its fan-shaped leaves five feet across, having pendent 

 marginal segments. The petioles are from four to five feet, rounded 

 below, flat above, the edges armed with short reflex spines, enveloped 



