THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN’S COMPANION.— August 10, ]850. 
308 
Gardeners’ Dictionary. It lias been treated as a green¬ 
house plant; “but it is quite likely that it will bear our 
winters in tho open air.” It flowers in April and May. Its 
flowers are lurid purple and green ; but its variegated leaves, 
dark green, very regularly mottled with a paler green, are its 
chief attraction.— {Ibid. t. 4932.) 
Agave Cei.sii (Cels’s Agave).—This has never been 
described before, though received many years since from 
M. Cels, of Paris. It is supposed to be a native of Mexico. 
It is a fine species, with extremely glaucous leaves, “ more 
resembling those of some Aluc than an Agave." It flowered 
for the first time at Kew in May and June of this year. 
Its flowers are green, and in a head, resembling that of a 
gigantic Plantain {Plantago). — {Ibid. 1. 4934.) 
MESSRS. EDWARDS’ GARDEN TALLIES. 
Youe paper of the 29tli tilt, contained a letter from Mr. j 
Lucas, of Louth, complaining of our conduct as traders. 1 
IVe should not have noticed his incoherent remarks; but 
as you have appended to his letter some editorial comments, j 
the matter calls for a few observations from us. 
Mr. Lucas’s complaint, divested of all verbiage, amounts j 
to this,—That having sent for, and received from us, sam¬ 
ples of our “tallies,” which were satisfactory; and having 
seen our advertisement descriptive of their sizes, &c.,hewas 
induced to order ten shillings’ worth; that when received 
they were unsatisfactory ; that he wrote a letter of complaint, 
to which we did not reply; that he wrote agqin, and was 
offered his money back. Of all these allegations, no one is 
true except the last. 
Mr. Lucas states that the samples sent “ were satisfac¬ 
tory; ” yet in his letter ordering the tallies he says, “ I hope 
they will be stiffer than the samples.” Surely, if this means 
anything, it means that the samples were not satisfactory. 
His next point is, that he was led from the advertisement 
to expect tallies of a given number to the inch, or he should 
not have ordered them. Now, the fact is, that at the time j 
lie sent us the order he had never seen our advertisement 
descriptive of the sizes of the tallies, as it was published for 
the first time in your paper of May 0th,—the very day on 
which he sent the order, and, under the most favourable I 
circumstances, could not have reached him in Louth until [ 
the following day. 
The next charge is, that he wrote a letter of complaint, | 
and received no reply. Whether or not this is intentionally I 
untrue we do not know; but we do know that we sent a I 
letter, of which the following is an exact copy:— 
“ Birmingham, June 27th, 1850. j 
“ Sir, —Replying to your letter of the 25tli inst.,inquiring | 
‘ what you are to do’ in respect of some tallies sent you a j 
few weeks ago, we can only ask, What you wish vs to do?” 
“ We are, Sir, your obedient Servants, 
“ E. Edwards and Co.” 
A few days after the despatch of this communication we 
received a .very long and angry letter from Mr. Lucas, the 
greater part of which was taken up by a history of some j 
two or three transactions in which he had been swindled by j 
persons to whom he had sent money, and from whom he 
had received nothing in return; the interesting statement 
concluding by classing us with those nameless persons as 
cheats, and threatening, unless we apologised or otherwise 
appeased his wrath “ by Monday next,” to hold us up to 
the indignation of the world. Well, we found we had for 
our correspondent that intensely-interesting creature, a man 
nursing his grievances, and we thought the best and shortest 
way of settling the matter was to offer the man his money 
back. This we did in the exact terms he has published, 
and we are not ashamed of it. 
In taking leave of Mr. Lucas and of this subject (for wo 
shall take no further notice of either), we beg most dis¬ 
tinctly to state that the samples were taken indiscriminately 
from the mass of stock; that the machine is so constructed 
that the tallies cannot vary (though, from being cut while 
the wood is saturated with water, they will shrink a little 
when put into a dry place); and that, consequently, they 
must have been the same as the sample. We have sold 
some hundreds of thousands, having supplied them to hun¬ 
dreds of persons in all parts of the kingdom; and we only 
remember to have received three complaints: one person, 
by mistake, had only half the proper quantity sent to him, 
and we made up the amount by sending him postage stamps 
for the deficient quantity; another sent ten-pence, from 
Scotland, for 500 tallies, to be enclosed through a friend of 
his in Birmingham, and ho afterwards wrote to say there 
wove Jour tallies short of his proper number! and the third 
is our friend Mr. Lucas, with regard to whom our only 
difficulty is to know under which head of his own category 
to class him—the “ innocent" or the “ unprincipled.” 
E. Edwaeds and Co., Birmingham. 
P.S.—Mr. Lucas's letters can be seen here by any person 
who may feel sufficient interest in the subject to induce 
him to take the trouble of verifying our statements. 
SONERI'LA ORBICULA'TA. 
This genus is of the Natural Order of Melastomads 
(Melastomacea;), and of Octandria Mortogynia in the 
Linmean System. 
Received from, and communicated by Dr. lloyle, May 15, 
1852, from the Nilgherry Mountains of India. 
Stems branched, a foot high, brittle, purplish towards the 
