140 The Natural System of Botany. 



Berberidace^e. The Barberry Tribe. 



This is an humble, but still very interesting tribe. Every body 

 is well acquainted with the common Barberry, Berberis vulgaris 

 of the Northern States, and not a few New England farmers 

 have a strong prejudice against it, and take every opportunity to 

 root it up, on account of their belief that it injures the corn 

 near which, along the fences, it so generally grows. Not- 

 withstanding its bad character, it is by no means an ill-looking 

 shrub, either in spring, with its pendulous racemes of yellow 

 flowers, or in the autumn, with its branches of brilliant red berries. 

 The leaves.have a very pleasant acid taste, and the berries make 

 an agreeable jelly when preserved in sugar, and are also made 

 into pickles. The branches are covered with very sharp spines, 

 sometimes divided into several parts. The manner in which 

 these are formed is curious, and will serve to illustrate the 

 theory, now generally adopted, which considers all the parts of 

 plants as different developments of the leaf, and which will be 

 stated fully in the course of our articles on physiology. 



These parts, (we quote from Prof. Lindley,) are not pric- 

 kles like those of the Rose, for they are regularly arranged 

 over the stem, and will not break off by a slight pressure side- 

 ways ; nor spines like those of the Hawthorn, for in the Haw- 

 thorn the spines originate in the bosom of the leaves, but in 

 the Barberry the leaves originate in the bosom of the spines. 

 These parts are an exceedingly curious state of the leaf. They 

 are the first kind of leaf that the Barberry produces when it 

 shoots forth from the bud ; but immediately after, or perhaps at 

 the same moment with, their production, other perfectly formed 

 leaves break out from their axils, and thus at nearly the same 

 instant, the branches are covered with spines for their defence, 

 and with leaves for their adornment. That these spines really 

 are leaves you may easily ascertain by looking for a very 

 vigorous shoot of the Barberry, when you will find some 

 of them with the space between the stiff spiny lobes 

 filled up by a web of parenchyma, (the fleshy portion of the 



