LOBELIA CARDINALIS. 

 CARDINAL'S FLOWER. 



NATURAL ORDER, LOBELIACE.E. 



Lobelia cardinalis, Linnaeus. — Stem tall, two to four feet high, simple, smoolhish ; leaves 

 oblong-lanceolate, slightly toothed ; raceme elongated, rather one-sided ; the pedicels 

 much shorter than the leaf-like bracts. (Gray's Botany of the Norlhe7-n United States. See 

 also Chapman's Flora of the Southern United States, and Wood's Class- Book of Botany.') 



ATHIAS DE L'OBEL, in whose honor Lobelia was 

 named, was born at Lisle, in Flanders, in 1538, and died 

 in London in 161 6, having reached die good old age of seventy- 

 eight. From the various accounts that have come down to us 

 we gather that he was a remarkable man. He appears to have 

 been taken to England before his twelfth year. In comparatively 

 early life, and during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, he was 

 gardener to the Earl of Zouch, at Hackney, near London. While 

 in this situation he distinguished himself as a botanist, and sub- 

 sequently was appointed botanist and physician to King James 

 the First. His works are voluminous, and profusely illustrated 

 by wood-cuts. These illustrations can scarcely be recognized 

 now as belonging to the plants for which they were intended, 

 and in this light it is amusing to find Lobel quoted by Gilibert, 

 as complaining that the cuts illustrating the work of his pre- 

 decessor, Mathiolus, are so unlike Nature, that he thinks this 

 early author must have drawn his pictures in many cases from 

 his imagination ! It is pleasant to feel that the art of delineadon 

 has now progressed to such perfection, that no one in the next 

 two or three hundred years will charge the authors of " Flowers 

 and Ferns of the United States" with a similar weakness. It 



was not till nearly one hundred years after his death that Lobelia 



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