forests, and one of them would purchase a
ship's cargo, as being an infallible antidote to
disease or poison, the ice was anything but
broken. The economical employment of
vegetable productions was then as difficult as
to make a sailing vessel advance through a
hard-frozen sea. It is easy enough, now, to
walk into a shop, and ask for an ounce of
gum-arabic, a box of quinine pills, or a
quarter of a pound of cinnamon and mace;
but the shopkeepers, and the people who
supply them, have not always found it so easy
to obtain their supply. With some articles
it is far from easy still. The ice is broken,
and that is all —- it is not quite melted. The
adventurer in search of woods, and gums,
and drugs, and dyes, still finds his sloop
bumped against and retarded by floating
lumps of drift-ice, in the shape of error and
prejudice, often thickly packed over the
whole surface of the waters he is navigating.

Hitherto, Economic Botany has been totally
neglected as a branch of popular education.
Nevertheless, young gentlemen destined to
travel, who have had it birched into them that
the nymph Daphne was metamorphosed into a
laurel, and that the pheasant's-eye flower
sprung from the blood of Adonis, would find it
just as useful to be able to recognise the foliage
of the teak and mahogany trees, the berry of
the coffee, or the stem of the Peruvian bark.
Even with regard to articles in common use,
such ignorance is widely spread, blinding the
eyes of the people with a thick veil. They
believe that capers grow in English gardens,
and that a shrub with trailing branches and
red berries is the tea-plant. Hundreds and
thousands of inveterate smokers and snuffers
might be led through fields planted with
tobacco without guessing what the crop
was. Do you, candid reader, know madder,
teazel, liquorice, and colza when you see
them, although your daily clothing and drink,
and even your nightly light, may be furnished
through their agency? Can you tell, by sight,
the difference between flax, hemp, and
gold-of-pleasure, as they grow ? If you cannot,
you will still hardly credit that English
farmers, within these last few years, have
thrown down fine crops of flax, as litter for
their live-stock, through the difficulty of
getting it properly managed and manipulated
into fibre! Other farmers have grown, for
textile purposes, the gold-of-pleasure —- a plant
whose seeds yield oil, and whose stalks make
brooms, but which can no more furnish thread
than a bunch of brittle reeds can! And yet
a little book on flax and hemp has been
insolently sneered at by an agricultural
journal, because the continental culture and
processes, instead of the English, are therein
taught!

The source of many vegetable productions
—- the subjects of Economic Botany —- is confined
within a limited circle by local peculiarities
of depth or quality of soil, of moisture
or temperature of climate. In such cases, it
is of little use to kick against the pricks, and
to fight against nature. But often the restricted
produce occurs merely because the
knowledge and practice of that special
culture is traditional on the spot, handed down
from father to son, from mother to daughter,
and learned by the children of successive
generations, with as little effort as the art of
cutting bread and butter, or eating soup.
The same crop is often unknown in other
districts, simply because of the dislike to
novelties entertained by rustics. A rural
population is like an old dog; you cannot
teach it new tricks. Flax culture and
manipulation, for instance, if we would adopt it as
practised in Flanders and the north of
France, would give bread to thousands of our
labourers otherwise starving, and would keep
our union-houses half empty in winter. On
the other hand, French peasants have their
prejudices too; they won't eat parsnips, any
more than ours will swallow sorrel-soup;
and they plant, rear, and train their roadside
elms to insure an unhealthy tree and a rotten
heart, with an obstinacy that would do credit
to martyrdom. They, like us, have gone on
in the same wheel-rut, for want of observing
better modes. One foreign mode we might
advantageously copy, —- that labourers should
learn two trades instead of one; for instance,
a man who cultivates flowers and fruit-trees
during their season, will turn sabotier, or
wooden-shoemaker, while the ground is bound
hard and fast with frost and snow; a ploughman,
or turf-cutter, or harvest-man, will earn
a certain livelihood by flax-scutching when
the days are grown short and the nights are
long; a letter-carrier all the morning and
evening, will be a tailor or a shoemaker from
ten till four. But, in the smaller branches of
economic botany, England has gone
back-wards almost as far as she has advanced in
horticulture. The high war and protection
prices caused several valuable crops to yield
their place to wheat; and, when a generation
of skilled labourers has passed away without
transmitting their art to their descendants, it
is far from easy to create another.

Look at saffron. We have Saffron Walden
on the map of England, and saffron buns in
the confectioners' shops; saffron is also to be
bought at the druggist's. We know that
saffron is the pistil, or central filament, which
hangs, like a cloven serpent's-tongue, from
the mouth of a species of crocus; but
we do not often see it growing, even in
gardens, as a choice curiosity. Neither may
we confound it with colchicum, or
meadow-saffron, a poisonous plant. The crocus
sativus, a bulbous flower, cultivated solely for its
aromatic stigmas, thrives in the central
departments of France in light, deep, rich,
well-drained land, which it occupies for three
successive seasons; after that, the soil is so
exhausted as to need rest, from saffron, for
seven, fifteen, or twenty years. When the
ground has been thoroughly prepared, in