THE ROYAL FAMILIES OF PLANTS. | 475 
form; some nearly perfect by the type, and others almost 
as regularly five-petalled and circular as an apple-bloom. 
But here the pod keeps as close to the normal style as 
the flower departs, so that we never lose our guide. In 
this set are the chief medicines and drugs that the family 
produces. We see examples of this tribe in the Wild 
Senna and Honey Locust. 
Third. A set remains in which the pea-shape is wholly 
obsolete, the flowers being as completely regular as any to 
be found. The pods, however, so far as we are informed, 
preserve the simple form, and our marks are fully vindi- 
cated. We have no indigenous plant that belongs here ; 
the greenhouse Acacias are those most familiar. The 
peculiar properties appear in the abundant production of 
gum and tannin. 
Like princes true, these plants take up nearly every 
variety of stature, habit, and soil. In regard to size, 
their range is perfectly enormous. In the gardens are 
species of Lotus that the gardener loves, and species of 
Medicago that he hates for the wretched weeds that they 
are, and neither of them is an inch high, but they creep 
on the earth like a carpet. There are perfect plants of 
the Pussy Clover that will go into an ounce vial with 
little crowding. Then, per contra, take the great Locusts 
of Brazil, described by Von Martius. Fifteen Indians, 
with outstretched arms, could just encircle the base of one 
of them. Some were measured and gave eighty-four feet 
in girth at the ground, and sixty feet where they first 
became cylindrical inform. This reliable observer made 
careful calculations on the age of these trees, and carried 
it back, in some cases, to the time of Homer, and, by all 
probability, beyond the Christian Era. The style and 
habit of these plants vary quite as much. The Honey 
