BEGONIA NITIDA. SHINING-LEAVED BEGONIA. 
Class XXI. MONCECIA. Order VI. POLYANDRIA. 
Natural Order, BEGONIACEiE. 
Generic Character. — Male flowers. — Calyx wanting. Corolla polypetalous ; petals commonly four, un- 
equal. Female flowers. — Calyx wanting. Corolla with from four to nine petals, generally unequal. Styles 
three, bifid. Capsule triquetrous, winged, three-celled, many-seeded. 
Specific Character. — Plant, a tall shrub. Leaves oblique, ovate, acute, obsoletely crenated, shining. 
Stipules oblong, cuspidate, keeled. Male flowers with four petals ; two roundish, two oblong, and smaller. 
Female flowers with five equal petals. Capsule with a large wing. 
Synonymous. — B. obliqua, B. purpurea, B. minor. 
It affords us much gratification to perceive that this family is in some degree engaging the attention it 
is worthy of ; but we have not yet much cause to exult, so little is the worth of its members appreciated, 
compared with what it ought to be. No genus of plants, as a whole, deserves more extensively to be grown ; 
distinguished as they are by so great a diversity of character, and real beauty, and flowering freely in the 
extreme : some species do so nearly always, and no portion of the year is unenlivened by the blossoms of 
some of them. And again, they are so easily cultivated ; several kinds grow and flower very freely in the 
greenhouse, though all are benefited by a warmer temperature, and many necessarily require it. 
“ The Botanical Magazine” (from which our specific character is borrowed) informs us that B. nitida was 
received at Kew from Dr. W. Brown, in 1779 : it is a native of Jamaica, and one of the best of the light- 
flowering species ; grows freely and erect, becoming a large bush, and bearing panicles of pinkish-white 
flowers in profusion all summer : these contrasting with the rather large, oblique, shining leaves, have a 
fine effect. 
The ease with which Begonias flourish and produce bloom under any kind of treatment, though ren- 
dering them plants which all may cultivate with success, has led (in conjunction, probably, with the suc- 
culency of their nature preventing their being regarded in any other light than as objects of ornament) to 
their merits being lost sight of. No plants are more susceptible of improvement by good culture than the 
family of which the one under consideration is a member : a plant of B. coccinea which recently came under 
our observation, enjoying in a high degree the benefit of good management, could scarcely be equalled 
(viewing it ornamentally) by any plant, whatever its merits. 
The name on the plate is one of the many by which this plant is known, but, as will be seen, is not 
the correct one. 
Begonia is in honour of Michael Begon, a botanist of the seventeenth century.* 
Professor Burnett, in his Lecture delivered in King’s College, observes, that, without reference 
to obscure archaeological researches, the antiquity of our science may fairly be assumed, for plants 
were the first beings that ever sprang instinct with life on this terraqueous globe, and their cul- 
ture and their care formed man’s earliest employment : since, on the third day of the Creation, 
so soon as the dry land appeared, when, at the Divine behest, the earth brought forth grass and herbs 
yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, and God saw that these works were good ; since the 
Almighty planted a garden eastward in Eden, and put man, whom he had made, therein to dress it and 
to keep it ; i. e. since out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight 
and good for food, and, to crown his works, created man to wonder and adore, among the numerous natural 
miracles which demand his notice and solicit his regard, as there are none that have received, perhaps there 
are few that have deserved, a greater share of attention than the wonders of the vegetable world, than the 
trees of the forest and the flowers of the field, which afford the chief and once the only means of sustenance 
to him and his. Hence some knowledge of such plants as are useful for food, as medicines, or in the arts, 
must have been almost coeval with our race, at least congenital with the wants of man ; and this knowledge, 
once empirical, and merely the result of casual observation, was then (as fitted best) called Herb-craft ; but 
since that the practice has been reduced to principle, it constitutes a science ; it is that branch of natural 
philosophy and natural history now termed Botany. But, as I shall endeavour to convince you, the botany 
of the natural philosopher is very different from the botany of the world at large ; very different from that 
specious yet unreal mockery of science, that spurious yet popular and fashionable trifling, which, uncon- 
scious of the first principles of vegetable physics, contents itself with superficially scanning the names of 
plants, esteeming that an end which should never be considered as more than a subordinate, a secondary 
mean. System is but an instrument, and should never be mistaken for the work it is destined to perform : 
and such botanists as would confine their studies to mere names and schemes, who burden themselves with 
* Paxton's Maeazine of Botany. 
