PASSAGES FROM POPULAR LECTURES. 
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among flowering plants. About sixty species are recognised 
as natives of Britain, and there are few counties in which 
half of this number might not be collected. 
The region of the earth in which the Umbelliferse are 
most common is the northern half of the north temperate 
zone in the eastern hemisphere. That is to say, the northern 
parts of Europe and Asia from the Arctic circle to the great 
mountain chains of the South, the Pyrenees, Alps, Balkans, 
Caucasus, and Altai. Beyond this district a few species are 
found as far as South Africa, America, and Australia, but they 
are only stragglers ; the home and centre of the order is 
Europe and Asia northward of the southern chains. It is the 
region of cornfields ard orchards. South of this region is the 
home of the Labiates, and north of it the land of Saxifrages. 
The corresponding region in North America is marked not by 
Umbelliferse, which are scarce there, but by some forms of 
the composites, especially asters and golden-rods ( Solidago ). 
The Umbelliferse, in their native centres, are plants of the 
lowlands and plains, as in this country and in central Europe. 
As they travel southward they find the climate too warm for 
them, and they have to climb the hills for coolness and fresh 
air. Wherever they can find lulls to climb they can live in 
Southern lands, but as they get nearer the equator, they 
must mount up higher and higher, till within the tropics such 
of them as are found at all are met with only on the lofty 
mountain tops ; just as in Great Britain there are several of 
the Saxifrages found only on the mountains of Scotland and 
Wales, which inhabit the lowlands further north in Lapland, 
Russia, and Siberia. 
This group of umbel-bearing plants holds an important 
place in Economic Botany. From it are derived several 
powerful drugs, gum-resins, volatile oils, and aromatic seeds, 
while a number of species are cultivated as esculent vegetables 
and pot-herbs. Among the drugs are assafietida, galbanum, 
ammoniacum, and opoponax ; among the aromatics, carraway, 
coriander, anise, dill, cummin, and angelica; the vegetables 
are carrots, parsnips, celery, and samphire, with the old- 
fashioned alexanflers and skirret, now rarely used ; and the 
pot-herbs are parsley, fennel, chervil, lovage, and sweet cicely. 
Their medicinal and aromatic qualities are due to three kinds 
of secreted juice, viz. : (1) Acrid watery sere-ctions which are 
poisonous. (2) Milky and gum-resinous secretions, which are 
stimulant and antispasmodic. (3) Aromatic essential oils, 
which are generally pleasant in flavour. Only those species 
can be used as food in which secretions of the first two forms 
are absent. 
