TJie Parasites. 109 



known everywhere in temperate climates, and valued for its 

 healthy and important fruits. It is said that in the days of chi- 

 valry, it a lady favored the suit of her loved, she wore Hawthorn 

 leaves, tied with carnation riband, which signified " hope in 

 love." To us it promises a beautiful spring; to the Greeks it 

 symbolized auspicious marriages ; to the Ethiopian tribe, im- 

 mortal life. In the Moral of Flowers, its authoress says : 



How true a type this hawthorn bough, 



Of youthful dreams in life's first morn, 

 So thick the fragrant blossoms grow, 

 What curious eye detects below 

 The frequent thorn 1 



But wait a few brief days, and soon 

 That bough of all its glory shorn, 

 Its fragrance spent, its blossom gone, 

 Will to thine eye show one by one 

 Each pointed thorn. 



Thus crowned with light and linked with flowers 



Seems life in youth's enchanting morn, 

 But soon, how soon the tempest lowers, 

 And stripping Fancy's fairy bowers 

 Lays bare the thorn. 



The Parasites, 



The great characteristic difference between plants and ani- 

 mals is the fact, that the former live on inorganic and the latter 

 on organic substances. Yet nature does not even allow this 

 to be always true, as there is a curious race of vegetables, 

 the Parasites, that will only exist on the elaborated juices of 

 others ; so nice is nature in all her gradations that she will not 

 allow science to form exact boundaries in any instance. A 

 common instance of this is the Dodder of our northern states, a 

 species of which ruins, by its warm and destroying attachment, 

 the flax of Europe, as well as its clover, being sometimes equally 

 destructive in our own fields. The celebrated missletoe is an- 

 other, of which, according to Nuttall, there is but one species in- 

 digenous in the United States, in which, however, it preserves 



