museum was therefore submitted to
and sanctioned by Parliament. An additional
opportunity of acquiring valuable collections
was afforded last summer, when I was
summoned by the French Imperial Commission
to take an active part in the jury of the
second class at the great Paris Exhibition.
That class, mainly relating to vegetable
products, offered the very objects most requisite
to enrich our collection. A grant of two
hundred pounds was accordingly obtained
from the Treasury, to be expended in
procuring such articles as were most important
to the Kew Museum, while the president of
the Board of Trade liberally offered to
expend an equal amount. Thus provided, and
further assisted by the several officers of the
Science and Art Department of the Board
then in Paris, and enriched by numerous
donations from many exhibitors, forty-eight
large cases were transmitted to Kew. They
contained vegetable products, many of them
very rare and valuable, from Algeria,
Australia, Austria, the East Indies, France, the
Grand Duchy of Hesse, Jamaica, Mauritius,
Norway, Prussia, Sardinia, Sweden, Tuscany,
the United States, Tasmania, Victoria,
Wurtemburg, and other places. All have arrived
in safety, and their contents will go far
towards filling up the surplus space in the
new museum.

"To say that this collection of vegetable
products is unrivalled, is saying little, and
no more than might have been asserted while
the museum was quite in its infancy, since
nothing of the same instructive kind had ever
been attempted. Ours is the gratification of
having set the example, which is now being
followed in several of our colonies, Jamaica,
Demerara, Melbourne, &c. The East India
Company is forming a similar museum in
London, at Calcutta, and at Madras; another
has been attached to the Botanic Garden of
Edinburgh, and a Museum of Applied Science
has been recently founded at Liverpool."

One fact must not be omitted. The total
number of visitors to Kew last year was
three hundred and eighteen thousand, eight
hundred and eighteen; their conduct is
described as being the subject of great
satisfaction. Indeed, such acts of impropriety as
are occasionally committed are plainly
described as belonging more frequently to the
well-dressed than to the lower classes.

           A SUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

NOBODY who ever experienced them can
forget the broiling days for which the islands
of the Mediterranean are famous. Whether
it is that their soil is generally bare and
rocky, and thus reflects the heat in an intense
degree, or from some other cause, there is no
doubt of the fact that an August sun in any
of these numerous floating paradises, from
the kingdom-like Majorca to the
shirt-stud-looking Capri, is fiercer, hotter, more
intolerable than it is ever found on the mainland.
The very waters flowing into those creeks
and bays add to the warmth, as if the great
sea had been long upon the boil, and
poured its hissing contents into the crevices
of the shore. But, when twilight comes, when
the first sound of the rising breeze is heard
among the olives — when the sky ceases to be
unendurable to the eye, and a soft veil
gradually envelopes its expanse, making its
blue more deep, and showing the faint, white
stars in its upper portion, while its skirts are
still bright with the last rays of the sun—-
then, all of a sudden, the spell that seems to
keep man and bird and beast immovable,
is removed, and voices are heard in all the
little gardens along the coast; boats flit
ghost-like —- but filled with music —- from
point to point. As night comes on darker
and darker, but never so dark in that region
of pellucid atmosphere as we experience in
the north, —- greater and greater grow the life
and motion, till when the midnight hour is
sounded from the distant church-tower, the
gay assemblages, uniting from the different
retreats where they have spent their evening,
take their homeward way to the city,
mingling their groups along the road, joining
in choral songs, and forming a sort of
irregular procession. It is very much the fashion
to look upon all foreigners as undomestic,
and therefore unaddicted to the home virtues.
A family in an English village sits round the
fire every month of the year, except from the
end of August till the beginning of September,
has the candles lighted at six or seven
o'clock, tea brought in at eight, the children
helped in their lessons and set for hours to
torture the broken-winded piano in the school-room.
The wife is busy looking over the
clothes brought home from the wash, the
husband is deep and sulky over yesterday's
Times, the front door is locked, the servants
all silent in the kitchen; a visitor at that
hour would frighten them out of their wits—-
an open window vould terrify them into
consumption. They have it all to themselves,
and get dreadfully tired of this invariable
happiness by the time the clock strikes ten,
and away they go to bed, to rise, perhaps,
with a headache next morning; to see, certainly,
either clouds or rain, and to make up
their minds to go eight miles to a dull and
formal dinner (for isn't it a pleasant neighbourhood
and full of society?) to which they
have been invited three weeks before, and
for which they must give a return-entertainment
in the course of two or three
months.

But the French! but the Italians! O,
they are an undomestic people. They have no
idea of the sanctities of home —- they neglect
their wives —- they deceive their husbands——
they dislike their children —- they have no
Christianity, —- no coal fires—- no feelings of
honour —- no under-done roasts of beef. Ah,