38 - FAMILIAR WILL FLOlVEltt. 



capsules, and guarantee an ample succession for the coming 

 year. We have thus seen it coming up year after year in 

 the same spot. When we speak of the novelty that a bril- 

 liant yellow poppy may be to many to whom the plant is 

 unfamiliar, we must not forget that we have already figured 

 another yellow poppy, the Common Horned Poppy (Glaucivm 

 luteum}, to be found on almost every strip of sandy or 

 shingly beach around our shores. 



Poppies are emblems of somnolence, and from one 

 species of them opium is obtained; but the following is 

 an interesting instance of a prolonged sleep a sleep of 

 centuries in the plants themselves. We were so struck 

 by the paragraph as it originally appeared in a medical 

 journal that we make no scruple in quoting it, in the 

 lively hope that others too may find an interest in it. 

 " The mines of Laurium are generally known to be largely 

 encumbered with scoriae, proceeding from the working of 

 the ancient Greeks, but still containing enough silver to 

 repay extraction by the improved modern methods. Pro- 

 fessor Hendreich relates, according to ' I/Union Medicale,' 

 that under these scoriae, for at least one thousand five 

 hundred years, has slept the seed of a poppy of the species 

 Glaucium. After the refuse had been removed to the 

 furnaces, from the whole space which they had covered 

 have sprung up and flowered the pretty yellow corollas of 

 this flower, which was unknown to modern science, but is 

 described by Pliny and Dioscorides. This flower had dis- 

 appeared for fifteen to twenty centuries, and its repro- 

 duction at this interval is a fact parallel to the fertility of 

 the famous mum my- wheat/' What the precise species 

 here referred to may be we cannot say, but its relation- 

 ship to our present -plant must, in any case, be a close 



