16 
elsewhere have tried to raise from seed the sarda melon. This has 
form, and never having the flavour of the Afghan fruit. The word 
sarda means cold, and subsequently came to mean the last fruits of the 
season left hanging on the trees when the main crop had been collected. 
The melon oo from the plants that yield the sarda whilst the 
season is and there is still no frost is, comparatively speaking, an 
ordinar oan melon, but once the season is ending and night frosts 
and then collect it Ves not ute ripe; these fruits ripen very slowly, 
will keep through the whole winter, and in flavour seem to improve the 
longer they are kept. It is this treatment, I believe, A" cmn abis 
the difference between the ordinary me elon and the sa why 
gardeners out of Afghanistan and Persia have not been ie: to produce 
the fine-flavoured Peshawur trade article, and which, even in the old 
caravan, now railway, days, were carried in perfection to Southern 
India. 
Seeds of the Sarda melon have been distributed te several Colonial 
Botanie Gardens and to the principal private gardens in this country, 
where meion cuitivation is made a speciality. 
Portrait of Samuel Frederick Gray.—Mr. Samuel Octavus m 
the grandson of the nominal author of that remarkable book: * 
Natural Arrangement of British Plants ” peg has quedas to 
collection of portraits of botanists at Kew cellent picture in oils 
of his grandfather, Samuel Frederick Gar the. father of John Edward Lu 
Gray and of George Robert Gray, who were respectively keeper and 
San keeper of the Zoological Department of the British Museum 
as one of a still unbroken line of botanists and z zoologists, whose 
relationships, however, have been etai confused. The subject of the 
portrait, Samuel F rederick Gray, the son of Samuel Gray, a seedsman 
and importer of flower-roots of Pal Mall, was born in 1766 and died in 
1828. He was from infancy and throughout his life of a delicate 
constitution; and after breaking down in an attempt to qualify himself 
for the medical profession, he resolved to devote himself to scientific 
research and literature. For a time he assisted Dr. Nares in editing a 
scientific review, and in 1797 he migrated to Walsall, and was associated 
with Dr. Black as a chemist and assayer of metals. He there became 
ments. In the year 1800 he returned to London, and was engaged in 
various scientific pursuits, until. 1806, when, on ile death of his uncle 
Edward Whitaker Gray, for some time secretary of the Royal Society 
and keeper of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, 
who arranged the collections on the Linnean system, he removed to 
Chelsea, where = occupied himself in lecturing on scientific subjects, 
and assisted = am Curtis, the author of the Flora Londinensis and 
the founder o f the Botanieal Magazine and his partner and successor, 
William Salisbury in their botanical work. It was here too, that he 
was engaged on his more important he * A Sup lement to the 
peia,” &c., and * A Natural Arrangement of British Plants. 
The latter, a work that had apparently been ee Sg by his ‘father, and in | 
which he was subsequently assisted by his E ye Forfeit Gray, 
(father of Samuel Octavus Gray) and John Edward G The latter, 
