486 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. [December 21,1872. 
goldilocks, and bistort grow in the Aisholt meadows; 
the stinking groundsel hard by the remains of Cole¬ 
ridge’s holly-bower. In the same neighbourhood I have 
twice found the purple broomrape; and Wilson’s filmy- 
fern, one of the rarest of British ferns, is established in 
the Poet’s Glen. 
I venture to hope that there is no one present to whom 
this catalogue of plants is a catalogue and nothing more, 
Chir English wildflowers are so charming in themselves, 
they awake in all of us so many associations, they hold 
so large a place in our poetical literature, their popular 
names reveal so many an etymological secret and recall 
so many a striking superstition, that almost every one, 
whatever be the line of his mental culture, is willing to 
own their interest and to linger over their recital. To 
the Shakspearian scholar they bring memories of Per- 
dita at the shearing-feast, of Ophelia in her madness, of 
Imogen sung to her untimely grave, of the grey dis- 
crowno d head of Lear, with its chaplet of “ rank fu- 
miters and furrow-weeds.” The lover of Milton points 
to the “rathe primrose,” the eye-purging euphrasy, and 
the amaranth, which was twined in the crowns of wor¬ 
shipping archangels. The historian of the long-buried 
past sees in the Cornish money-wort, the filmy-fern, and 
the Lusitanian butterwort of our hills evidence distinct 
and. graphic of the time when Scotland, Ireland and 
Spain formed with our own peninsula portions of a 
single continent. The student of folk-lore tells his 
tales of the ceremonies which surrounded the vervain, 
the. St. John’s-wort, and the rowan, and of the strange 
beliefs which clung to the celandine, the hawkweed, and 
the fumitory. The etymologist will elevate the names 
familiar to us all into records of the origin and habits of 
our remote forefathers; he will disinter the fragments 
of myth and history which lie embalmed in the cen¬ 
taury, the paiony, the carline thistle, the flower-de-luce, 
j nd the herb Robert; he will tell us how the laburnum 
closes its petals nightly like a tired labourer, how the 
campion crowned the champions of the tournament, how 
the foxglove, the troll-flower, and the pixie-stool, bring 
messages from fairy land ; how the scabious, the lung¬ 
wort, the scrophularia, and the wound-wort, bear wit¬ 
ness to the grotesque beliefs of a pre-scientific medical 
community. Of the botanist I need not speak. Not a 
flower that blows but will furnish him with the text of 
an eloquent discourse. Forms that yield to other men 
artistic and sensuous enjoyment only, lay bare before 
him secrets of structure and of function as wonderful as 
those which characterize his own bodily frame ; sug¬ 
gesting each its truth of design, and natural selection, 
and adapted change, and mysterious organic force. In 
the fructification of the orchid, the stamens of the bar- 
berry, the hairs of the nettle, the leaf of the sundew, he 
reads lessons as profound and similes as graceful, as were 
taught, to Chaucer, and Southey, and Wordsworth, by 
the daisy, and the holly, and the lesser celandine. Year 
after year he greets the early spring with an enthusiasm 
which his neighbours know not, as one by one his 
friends of many years, the snowdrop and the violet, and 
the crimson hazel stigma, and the stitch-wort, and the 
daffodil, and the coltsfoot, come back to him like swal¬ 
lows from their winter sojourn out 'of sight. Year 
after year, as the seasons die away and the earth is once 
more bare, he looks back delighted on the pleasant 
months along which he has walked hand in hand with 
Nature; for he feels that his intelligence has been 
strengthened, his temper sweetened, and his love of God 
increased, by fellowship with her changes, study of her 
secrets, and reverence for her works. 
Persian Saffron.—Dr. Hager reports that he has 
received under this name some agglutinated cakes having 
a fatty odour, which contained a few crocus stigmas, but 
consisted chiefly of narrow yellow petals saturated with 
a thick oil readily dissolved in ether. He states that it 
may be easily distinguished from true saffron by its 
imparting a yellow colour to petroleum ether. 
AN IMPROVED FORM OF FILTER PUMP. * 
BY T. E. THORPE, F.B.S.E. 
In the ‘ Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesell- 
schaft’ (No. 7, 1872), Dr. Mendelejeff is reported to 
have described a new form of filter-pump devised by 
M. Jongo, or Moscow, which is so exceedingly simple 
and efficacious that it will doubtless be universally set 
up in laboratories. The disposition of the apparatus 
will be readily understood from the annexed figure, 
which represents it in the modified form about 
to be described. It consists of a tube A A about 
1 metre in length and from 8 to 10 millimetres in dia¬ 
meter, to the side of which is affixed a side tube B about 
5 centims. in length. The upper end of the vertical 
tube A is cut slantwise in the manner represented in the 
enlarged figure (fig. 2), and is connected by means of a 
strong but sufficiently elastic caoutchouc tube with the 
stopcock C in connection with the water-supply. In the 
original apparatus a Bunsen valve was fitted into the 
side tube ; that is, the caoutchouc tube D D was stopped 
at the upper end with a short piece of glass rod and cut 
along its length near the end by a smart blow from a 
chisel. The edges of the slip were thus left sharp ; and 
on applying any outward pressure to the tube they 
readily adhered, making a perfectly air-tight conjunc¬ 
tion. The valve was then pushed within the tube B, 
which was narrowed at the end so as to retain the 
caoutchouc tube perfectly air-tight. The other end of 
the caoutchouc tube D D was connected with the vessel 
to be evacuated. On allowing the water from the main 
to flow through the vertical tube, the caoutchouc tube 
commences to pulsate rapidly as it falls over the upper 
edge of the tube A, and periodically closes the opening. 
The Bunsen valve in consequence intermittently opens 
* Read before .ne British Association at Brighton, 1872* 
reprinted from the ‘Philosophical Magazine ’ for October. * 
