THE FLORIST 



AND HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 



ARALIA(?) PAPYRIFERA. 



About twenty years ago, in the course of his botanical and horticultural 

 researches in China, Mr. John Reeves procured a living specimen of the rice 

 paper plant, and sent it to the garden of the Horticultural Society at Chis- 

 wick. Unfortunately, it died soon after without having flowered, and all 

 which remained of this first discovery was the drawing of a sterile branch of 

 the species, which was made in China from a specimen cultivated in Mr. 

 Reeves' garden. It is this which we figure here under the name of Aralia (?) 

 papyrifera. 



Resting on a document not very clear, the knowledge of the paper plant 

 of China was far from being precise. The small number of botanists who 

 had an opportunity of seeing the drawing, hazarded nothing on the relations 

 of a plant deprived of flowers and fruit, except doubtful and often contradic- 

 tory conjectures. The opinions were especially divided between the Mal- 

 vaceae and Araliacese, and it is towards this latter family (joining with it, 

 for greater latitude, the Umbelliferge) that, according to Sir Wm. Hooker, 

 Dr. Lindley inclined. 



In the meanwhile, there arrived in the hands of Sir William Hooker the 

 materials of the work already quoted, on the origin and the manufacture of 

 the Chinese paper. Very much advanced, almost to completion, by the 

 intelligent researches of Mr. Layton, the question was unfortunately obscured 

 as to the botanical determination of the paper-bearing species, by too great 

 a faith in the Chinese drawing, which gave for this plant a form shapeless- 

 and fantastic, different from any known object. This gross imposition of a 

 maliciou3 mystifier threw an unmerited suspicion upon the drawing of Mr. 

 Reeves. But the evil was not great ; rather these doubts served to give a 

 lively and unforeseen attraction to questions, which, but for that y would 

 have remained uninvestigated. 



Renewing, with a meritorious zeal, the researches which had been inter- 

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