to empty themselves with violence, and the movement of the leaves may be ascribed to the 

 recoil produced by the discharge. Thixs we have, in every leaf, a sort of vegetable battery, 

 which will keep up its fire until the stock of ammunition is expended." — Botanical Register. 

 The movements of the leaves upon the water have been compared to a fleet of ships em- 

 ployed in manucBvring, or to persons engaged in dancing. — See Loudon's Gardeners^ Maga- 

 zine, vol. ix. p. 377. The Schinus molle presents the same curious phenomena. 



Gossip. — Cowper writes thus to his friend Newton : " I delight in baubles, and know 

 them to be such ; for, viewed without a reference to their Author, what is the earth ? what 

 are the planets ? what is the sun itself but a bauble ! . Better for a man never to have seen 

 them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute (stupid, and unconscious of what he beholds), 

 than not be able to say : ' The Maker of all these wonders is my friend.' The eyes of many 

 have never been opened to see that they are trifles ; mine have been, and will be till they 

 are closed forever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, hothouse, rich as a West 

 Indian garden, things of consequence ; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with 

 ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines 

 it contains will ever be worth a farthing ; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord 

 Butler's gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with it ; and, when I have paid 

 the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself: 'This is not mine ; 



'tis a plaything, lent me for the present. I must leave it soon.' " The extent of the 



credulity of mankind scarcely needs illustrations ; the changes of opinion are, however, 

 truly curious. Till very lately, real mummy was sold, in the Philadelphia drug stores, as 

 a curative remedy. Powder of silkworms was formerly given for vertigo ; mellipedes, for 

 the jaundice ; fly -water, for earache ; five gnats were considered a dose of excellent physic ; 

 lady-birds, for colic and measles ; ants were incomparable for leprosy and deafness. A 

 learned Italian professor assures us that a finger once imbued with the juices of a certain 

 beetle, will retain its power of curing toothache for a year. One pundit taught that the 

 efi'orts of the silkworm to spin its cocoon, was the result of colic. The instincts of in- 

 sects in constructing their habitations, defy our penetration ; there is one species which 

 excavates a gallery upwards of two feet in length, and half an inch broad. It is furnished 

 at the orifice with a curiously constructed door, actually turning on a hinge of silk, and, as 

 if acquainted with the laws of gravity, she invariably fixes the hinge at the highest side 



of the opening, so that the door, when pushed up, shuts again by its own weight. The 



minority report of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institute, in 1854, signed by Hon. James 

 Meachan, contains some home truths. Alluding to the publications of the Institute, it says : 

 "They are Smithsonian contributions just in the sense that the publications of Appletons, 

 Putnam, and Lippincott, may be called Appletonian contributions to knowledge, Putnamian, 

 or Lippincottian contributions to knowledge. The only difference is the degree of credit 

 obtained for the work ! In Syria, apricots are dried in great quantities, says a late travel- 

 ler, and exported to Egypt under the name of Mishmush, where they constitute a most pala- 

 table and convenient article of a traveller's commissariat, as, when stewed, Uiey make an 

 excellent dish, soon got ready ; the fruit keeps perfectly well in this dry climate, and sufiicient 

 for a month's consumption, or longer, can be stowed in a very small compass. Mishmush 

 was a principal article in our cuisine during our voyage up the Nile, and, from its port- 

 ability, it is excellently adapted for desert travelling. Zumner 5 deen (the moon of the 

 faithful) is the same fruit difierently prepared, and is equally known as mishmush, but is 

 very inferior in quality to the former kind. It consists of the pulp of the apricot rolled out 

 (after drying, I should suppose) into thin sheets two or three feet long, and a foot or two in 

 width ; and, from its dark color, and the edges of the sheet being left untrimmed (as 

 case of the peach leather of America), it resembles nothing so much as a blacksmith 



