VISITING THE GARDENS 191 



be identified after successive alterations that 

 have brought them to their present state. 



The largest, and, on the whole, the most 

 attractive of the Museums is No. I., whose red 

 face looks across the Pond to the Palm House. 

 Its staircase is adorned with a window that 

 reminds one of the rebus designs with which 

 mediaeval builders recorded their names in a 

 material pun, for this, removed from the Guild- 

 hall and presented to the Gardens by Alderman 

 Cotton, displays on stained glass the stages in 

 the growth and manufacture of cotton. The 

 catalogue contains over five hundred entries and 

 thousands of specimens, most of them capable of 

 instructing even Macaulay's schoolboy. A large 

 part of the collection was transferred here from 

 the India Museum at South Kensington ; but 

 all quarters of the world are represented. Here 

 we may see in various states, tea, coffee, cocoa, 

 wine, tobacco, hops, nutmegs, cloves and other 

 more or less familiar friends, with some not so 

 well known in Britain, such as mate, the 

 Paraguayan tea, which begins to be introduced 

 among us, while it -goes out of fashion in 

 Argentine cities, still drunk all day long on the 

 campos, where also the half-savage Gaucho takes 



