32 EUPHORBIA PULGENS. 
E. splendens, even when in its highest perfection. In the stove it thrives best in a 
temperature varying from 70 to 73 degrees Fahrenheit, and potted in a mixture of 
very sandy heath-mould and loam, liberally watered. The plants grow rapidly, 
and may be increased with facility from cuttings in sand. 
The generic name Euphorhia is derived from Euphorbus, a physician to Juba, 
king of Mauritania, and said to have first used the plant in medicine. 
The specific wdim^fulgens applies to the splendour and brilliancy of the flowers. 
The following remarks on this valuable and very desirable exotic were made by 
M. F. Ranch, during a gardening tour in Germany in the spring of 1836, and 
recorded in the Gardeners' Magazine for August, whence our extract. 
" Euphorhia fulgens is an elegant and very ornamental plant, of the following 
characteristics: — It is a branched, upright, leafy, freely growing, and freely 
flowering shrub. All its green parts bear a glaucous bloom. Its shoots are 
slender, twig-like, round, glabrous, and curved outwards in their terminal portion ; 
bearing the flowers along this portion in groups, in the axils of the leaves. The 
leaves have petioles nearly one inch long, and disks that are lanceolate, tapered to 
both ends, entire, about three inches long, and from half an inch to one inch across 
in the broadest part. The groups of flowers are upon short stalks, and consist of 
from two to four flowers (as they would be ordinarily called), each upon a stalk 
about one inch long ; and each showy from its involucre, which is of a bright red 
colour, and which has a tube of less than half an inch long, and a horizontally 
spread border of a diameter somewhat less than that of a sixpenny-piece, and 
consisting of five obcoidate lobes. One may imagine that a bush, abounding in 
groups of these involucres displayed together, must be splendid, and well merit the 
application of the epithet y^/^ew* ; which, however, the inventor of the name may 
rather have intended to express a brilliance in the redness, than the general efl"ect 
produced by a display of flowers of this colour. This plant appears disposed to 
produce plenty of seeds." 
