THE VICTORIA REGIA. 



dismay, with all thoughts of seeking hospitality at such a home driven clean out of 

 his head ? 



We are at a loss to know how our shrewd neighbors of New-England have been 

 persuaded into such a very considerable item of needless expenditure as this same 

 hideous display of lightning conductors on every house must have cost, all over that 

 populous country. We suppose some magician, "cuter" than the "cutest," must 

 have waved his iron rod over them, with some potent spell of incantation, to have pro- 

 duced such an eflFect on a whole people, where the school-master is so thoroughly 

 abroad as he is there. We have questioned and cross-questioned, and for the life of 

 us, cannot ascertain that any greater damage is sustained in the farm buildings and vil- 

 lage dwellings of New- York and Pennsylvania, where one lightning rod answers for a 

 whole building, than in New-England, where it takes 50 or 100 points of the very 

 sharpest description, shooting up into the air in all directions. 



We know very well the philosophy of protection which the savans have laid down 

 — that only a certain circle beyond the conductor's point of radius, is protected by that 

 point — but, in good truth, it is but very rarely that a dwelling is struck at all — 

 because tall trees standing near and about it, conduct away the fluid first, and any 

 barn with a cupola ventilator, and a single high rod surmounting it, one which may 

 be made most useful and ornamental, would be amply protected. 



At any rate, we would as soon have a fire engine, with all its customary accessories 

 of noisy boys, and red flannel shirts, and hoarsely bellowing trumpets, standing perpetu- 

 ally before our front door, because a fire might break out once in fifty years, as to have 

 our house skewered and stuck with sharp points in all imaginable directions, because 

 such a misfortune might happen as for the electric fluid to step out of its usual cur- 

 rent to pay us a visit. In the town where we live, with a population of 11,000 souls, 

 not one house in five has even one lightning conductor, and we do not remember in the 

 whole of our life, of a single death by lightning, or one house damaged to the extent of 

 one hundred dollars. Certainly, a wise man will not build a good house and neglect 

 a reasonable share of precaution to guard it against possible mischance — but this hys- 

 terical nervousness of our good New-England friends, about lightning, is a mania 

 about which they have not the less run " clear daft," than we, in this part of the 

 country, have with that optical abomination, the "Victoria brown" disease. 



THE VICTORIA REGIA AT MR. COPE'S. 



BY THOMAS MEEHAN, HOLMESBURGH, PA. 



Mr. Cope's success with the culture of this most gigantic of water lillies is one of the 

 most satisfactory triumphs of American horticulture. An aquatic whose leaves measure 

 6 feet across, and that demands a pond under glass twenty or thirty feet across, the wa- 

 ter in which must be kept perpetually warm and in motion, is not a plant which one per- 

 son in a thousand would undertake the culture of, for the first time in the United States, 



