488 LETTERS FROM ENGLAND. 



tralian house, the New-Zealand house, and a dozen other glass 

 structures, contain all the riches of the vegetable kingdom which will 

 not bear the open air, and each in the highest state of cultivation. 

 Giant cactuses from Mexico, fourteen feet high, and estimated to be 

 four hundred years old, and rock gardens under glass, filled with all 

 the ferns and epiphytes of South America, detain and almost satiate 

 the eye with their wonderful variety, and grotesqueness of forms 

 and colors. 



In the open grounds are many noble specimens of hardy trees, 

 of great beauty, which I must pass by without even naming them. 

 I saw here the old Deodar cedar and araucaria imbricata in Eng- 

 land, each about twenty-five feet high, and justifying all the praises 

 that have been lavished upon them ; the former as the most grace- 

 ful, and the latter the boldest and most picturesque of all evergreens. 

 The trunk of the largest araucaria, or Chili pine, here, is of the 

 thickness of a man's leg ; and the tree looks, at a distance, like a 

 gigantic specimen of deep green coral from the depths of the ocean. 

 I was glad to know, from experience, that those two noble ever- 

 greens are quite hardy in the northern States. You may judge of 

 the scale on which things are planned in Kew, when I mention that 

 there is a wide avenue of Deodars, newly planted (extending along 

 one of the vistas from the palm-house), 2,800 feet long. A steam 

 engine occupying the lower part, and a great reservoir the upper 

 part of a lofty tower, supplies, by the aid of concealed pipes, the 

 whole of the botanic garden with water. 



I should not omit the museum a department lately com- 

 menced, and upon which Sir William Hooker is expending much 

 time. It is in some respects, perhaps, the most useful and valua- 

 ble feature in the establishment. Here are collected, in a dried 

 state, all the curious and valuable vegetable products especially 

 those useful in the arts, medicine, and domestic economy all the 

 raw vegetable materials the fibre the manufactured products, etc. 

 Here, one may see the gutta percha, of the East Indies, in all its 

 states the maple sugar of America the lace-bark of Jamaica 

 the teas of China, and a thousand other like useful vegetable pro- 

 ducts, arranged so as to show the stages of growth and manufac- 



