104 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
is simply Padma. The learned Brahmins call 
the Egyptian deities Padma Devi, or Lotus- 
Gods; the second of the eighteen Hindoo 
Puranas is styled the Padma Purana, because it 
treats of the “epoch when the world was a 
golden Lotus;” and the sacred incantation 
which goes murmuring through Thibet is ‘Om 
mani padme houm.” It would be singular, if 
upon these delicate floating leaves a fragment 
of our earliest vernacular has been borne down 
to us, so that here the schoolboy is more learned 
than the philologists. 
This lets us down easily to the more familiar 
uses of this plant divine. By the Nile, in early 
days, the water-lily was good not merely for 
devotion, but for diet. “From the seeds of 
the Lotus,” said Pliny, “the Egyptians make 
bread.” The Hindoos still eat the seeds, roasted 
in sand; also the stalks and roots. In South 
America, from the seeds of the Victoria (Vym- 
phea Victoria, now Victoria Regia) a farina is 
made, preferred to that of the finest wheat, 
— Bonpland even suggesting to our reluctant 
imagination Victoria-pies. But the European 
species are used, so far as is reported, only in 
dyeing, and as- food (if the truth be told) of 
swine. Our own water-lily is rather more power- 
ful in its uses; the root contains tannin and 
gallic acid, and a decoction of it “ gives a black 
