528 ARACE-E. [Arum. 



" Utramque jam vivam observe, in eodem loco A. maculalum per ooto dies prsBco- 

 cius est immaculato."* In this island 1 can perceive no difference in the time of 

 flowering, and the leaves of both are alike variable in size and shape. The spot- 

 ted form would appear to be the rarer towards the North, where, as in Sweden 

 and Denmark, this variety is nearly an entire stranger. Specimens occur with us 

 occasionally in which the leaves are broadly veined with frreenish white as in the 

 foreign A. italicum, which is by many botanists regarded as a variety merely of 

 our A. maculatum. To myself they have always appeared palpably distinct. The 

 former, with which I have been long familiar in the South of Europe, is a much 

 larger plant than ours, the leaves more perfectly hastate, with very divaricate 

 lobes, that stand nearly at right anfiles to the midrib, which, as well as the late- 

 ral veins, are for the most part strongly marked above with white; the leaves too 

 are more uniform in shape, and do not exhibit the same great diversity of outline 

 as in A. maculalum, besides which they are habitually evolved at the close of the 

 year, and remain green through the winter, which is rarely the case with the 

 other, and then only as it were accidentally, in warm sheltered situations, by a sort 

 of natural forcing. Arum italicum is the prevailing species over the South and 

 South-west of Europe, where A. maculatum is seldom seen except in elevated 

 places. I remarked it, during a journey from Orleans to Bordeaux, to make its 

 appearance for the first time on approaching Poitiers, after which it became com- 

 mon, and about Bordeaux is everywhere to be met with, ranging all along the 

 western maritime departments of France to Brittany as far as lat. 48° or perhaps 

 higher. Throughout Italy it abounds in the most open sunny exposures, not 

 being the shade- and moisture-loving plant that A. maculatum is, nor does it, like 

 that, inhabit the more interior countries of the European continent under its 

 limitrophe parallels, as Switzerland, Hungary, Austria Proper, &c. 



The acrimony that pervades the entire plant is quickly dissipated by heat or 

 drying, when the tubers yield a beautifully white starchy substance, possessing all 

 the qualities of arrow-root, for which purpose they are dug up in Portland Island, 

 and the prepared farinaceous matter sent to London in considerable quantity, 

 under the name of Portland Sago, chiefly for the use of invalids. Were the de- 

 mand more general, this island could alone furnish an inexhaustible supply for 

 the market of a valuable production, now neglected because not conventionally 

 used as an article of diet. In ruder states of Society mankind readily seek out 

 and appropriate those spontaneous gifts of Nature which in more civilized com- 

 munities are overlooked or contemned. The savage starves not, for the field and 

 the forest are his granary, on which he relies for unbought subsistance : the poor of 

 our land perish if the hand of bounty be withdrawn, for they must be fed with the 

 purchased food which labour prepares for the rich as well as the needy. The 

 farinaceeus roots of various aroid plants afi'ord subsistence to tribes the most 

 remote from one another, and living under climates the luost dissimilar. The 

 Egyptian of ancient and modern times possesses his Colocasia, whilst the swart 

 children of Nigritia carried iheir Eddow and Cress from the shores of Africa to 

 the land of their captivity in the western hemisphere. Nor has Nature denied 

 even to the extreme North a resource against those seasons of scarcity incident to 

 a climate so rigorous, in the fleshy rhizoma of a plant of the same natural order, 

 growing in the frozen swamps about the Gulf of Bothnia. The root of the Marsh 

 Dragons {Calla palustris) furnishes the inhabitants of the extreme North of Eu- 

 rope with a white and most palatable bread, a full account of the properties and 

 preparation of which is given by Linnaeus, in his ' Flora Lapponica.'f 



It is probable the young fresh leaves of our Wake Robin might, when boiled, 

 furnish an excellent spring kale, as do those of Caladium esculentum in the West 



* Fl. Germ. Excurs. i. adden. et corrig. p. 138. 



f " Panis hie albus est duelis et gratissimus, proesertim recens. Usus hujus 

 panit primarius et receptissimus apud Westrobothnienses, Ostrobothnienses et 

 Novaccolas Lappouiae. Panis hie longe prgefertur pineo, qui nee usurpalur, 

 quamdiu hujus sufficiens prostat copia." — Fl. Lapp. p. 250. 



