FUCHSIA MACRANTHA. 
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FUCHSIA MACRANTHA. 
(Hooker.) 
THE LAUGE-FLOWEKED FUCHSIA. 
The Fuchsia is a very popular family of plants, and though 
not a very extensive one, as compared with others we are ac- 
quainted with, yet it comprehends very considerable variety, 
both in the flowers, and in the habit of growth of the species 
which it contains. We are now looking at the genus, botani- 
cally — as afamily group of distinct individual forms, called species. 
Florists have intermixed these species, until they have given rise 
to an almost endless number of varieties, some of which are indeed 
very distinct and very handsome, but the great majority are 
considered by many persons to be very much inferior in beauty 
to the original kinds from which they were produced. The 
great and prevailing faults of these varieties are their sameness 
and tameness of colouring, and their coarseness of texture, which 
points — and they are blemishes — are much more observable in 
very many of the hybrids than in their parents. 
The wild species are variously distributed, but with hardly an 
exception are found in the New World. Some of them are small 
spreading shrubs, with small flowers, of which class one now 
much neglected, called mierophylla, is a floral gem. Others are 
of larger size, with much larger flowers hanging on long stalks 
like "ear-drops," from the base of every leaf, and furnishing the 
old-fashioned idea of a Fuchsia. Subsequently to the introduc- 
tion of these, some kinds, with tube-shaped flowers several inches 
long, and hanging in dense bunches from the end of the branches, 
have made their appearance in our gardens ; and others, again, 
have been imported, which, we are told by travellers, cling to the 
forest vegetation of South America, something in the way that 
the ivy embraces our native sylvan forms. Many species known 
to botanists, and which are regarded by them as the most re- 
markable native forms, remain to be introduced. Florists have 
