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in our local Flora I know not. I have endeavoured to do so ; 

 and it is much to be wished that more of the members of our 

 club would enter upon a field, in which there are so few 

 labourers, but in which there is as much to be done, as much 

 deserving our attention, and as much to afford rational occupation 

 and amusement to those who follow it up, as in the fields so 

 industriously turned over by the Geologists and Antiquarians. 



Lord Bacon has pronounced a garden to be "the purest of 

 human pleasures, the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man." 

 If this be true of the gardens which man plants, it is not less 

 true of those gardens which nature has planted, and to which 

 man is indebted, in the first instance, for all the choice flowers 

 he so highly values. There is, indeed, a diff"erence between the 

 two, but not one surely to depreciate the latter in our estimation. 

 Our gardens are set out and arranged according to conventional 

 rules, and often so artificially conceived as to lie open to the 

 faults of stiffness and formality — whereas nature observes no 

 fixed order in the keeping and grouping of her parterres — neither 

 trimming her beds, nor parcelling out her plants according to 

 their particular hues and modes of growth. But is not nature's 

 garden all the more captivating for its wild luxuriance, its rich 

 and varied colours thrown promiscuously together, and the 

 unrestrained freedom with wliich trees, shrubs, and flowers are 

 allowed to intermingle, giving to the bright field, the tangled 

 bank, and thick wood, each its peculiar charm, and such as is no 

 where to be found or enjoyed except amid rural scenery ? 

 Where, too (in reference to Bacon's remark), is to be attained 

 more evenness of mind, or more unalloyed satisfaction, than iu 

 the country rambles, not of the botanist alone, but of all who 

 take the smallest interest in the unnumbered productions of the 

 veget?ible kingdom — we might add of all true lovers of the 

 picturesque t For myself, I can truly say that some of the 

 happiest hours pf my life, when the mind was most free from the 

 distracting cares of the world, and I might add most out of 



