THE KEW MUSEUM. 91 
employed for food, or from which food is prepared, form a very 
prominent part of this remarkable collection. The vegetable 
materials manufactured into cloth, bags, mats, cordage, etc., are 
scarcely less important than those supplying human food. If to 
these we add the medicinal plants, together with those used in 
art and in our various manufactories, we may have some idea of 
the magnitude of this great national repository. When we state 
that the Museum contains the famous collection formed by 
Messrs. Peter Lawson and Son, one of the attractive features at 
the Great Exhibition of 1851, also the extensive samples of 
woods, both British and foreign, which were the admiration of 
thousands who visited the Crystal Palace, our readers will have 
only a very incomplete notion of the value and interest of these 
specimens of the vegetable kingdom. They must be seen to be 
sufficiently appreciated and admired, and they should be exa- 
mined with this comprehensive handbook as a guide or index to 
their names and properties. 
The catalogue commences with Room No. 1, and with the 
Ranunculacee, or Crowfoot family, plants which, though des- 
titute of dietetic properties, yield many powerful medicines. 
These plants, and the various articles prepared from them, occupy 
the first case. The principal plants of almost every family are 
described or named, and the products which they bear are suc- 
cinctly stated. We will give an example or two of the author’s 
luminous mode of representing the objects of the Museum. 
“ PAPAVERACE®. Poppy Family.—This possesses narcotic and acrid 
properties in an eminent degree. The juice is often white, yellow in Chelido- 
nium majus, red in Sanguinaria canadensis. One species alone, the Opium 
Poppy, may in its legitimate use be reckoned amongst the greatest bless- 
ings to mankind, ‘magnum Dei donum;’ and by its misuse the greatest 
curse. Pereira’s ‘ Elements of Materia Medica’ bears ample testimony 
to the former, and the ‘Confessions of an Opium-Eater’ to the latter. 
Upwards of six millions of pounds are manufactured and sold by the Hast 
India Company; twenty millions of pounds are consumed, at a cost of 
twenty millions of English money.” 
We refer our readers to the interesting account of the prepa- 
ration of this drug. See pp. 13, 14, 15 of Catalogue, and ‘ Kew 
Garden Miscellany,’ vol. vi. 
“ CRUCIFER®.—Tree or Cow Cabbage, one of the most remarkable of 
the Cabbage kind, having a hard, woody stalk. . . . We remember a 
