Orchall, a beautiful purple dye, litmus, so
useful in chemical tests, and cudbear yielding
a red dye, are all lichens. The bark of the
quercus tinctoria gives the yellow dye
quercitron; and weld, also a yellow dye, comes
from the same family as the mignonette.
Turmeric, a very rich but evanescent dye,
comes from a gourd; the hickory bark yields
a small amount of quercitron; and anatto, a
reddish-yellow paste, is made from the berries
of the bixa orellana; the carthamus tinctorius
gives an orange-red dye; walnut-peel, the
yellow-brown which we call fawn and
the French mauve; and alkanet, giving a red-
brown dye, is a borage.

Going back to the lichens and their salt-
water congeners, the algæ, or seaweeds, we
find that Iceland moss, held in such esteem
as anti-consumptive, is a lichen; while
Caragheen moss is, on the contrary, a
seaweed. The Chinese edible birds'-nests, of
which we have all heard; kelp, made from
the ashes of the fuci; ulva or laver; agar-
agar from the Indian Archipelago, used for
stiffening silks and for making a jelly like
that of the Caragheen moss—all these are
from the worthless seaweed—the long line of
tangled wrack upon the shingles, which
summer bathers hold as useless weeds,
valuable only for their colours, and their quaint
unearthly growths.

Passing on from dyes and seaweeds to oils
and gums, what have we? From flax,
linseed oil; from the common ricinus, a spurge,
castor oil—castor oil also from the palma
christi; from an andropogon, or man's beard,
the sweet grass-oil of Namur, which enters
largely into our most refined perfumes,—
another andropogon furnishing the khus-khus,
of which are made the small swing
handscreens and tatties, or grass Venetian blinds
of India; from the butter vegetable, shea:
oils from the olive, palm, almond, and cocoa-
nut trees, from sunflowers, from the sesamum,
and from cinnamon, from the gamboge-
trees which yield butter and resins, and that
most exquisite of all fruits, the mangosteen;
from the croton, a spurge; from nutmegs;
with more that we could name if we cared
to make a mere catalogue. We have given
only the most familiar. Then, for gums,
there is, first, the great blue gum-tree of
Van Diemen's Land, a myrtle, and a very
fine-grained wood, a eucalyptus, yielding
kino; then there is the zizyphus, or jujube-
tree, one of the buckwheat tribe; and the
balsam-trees, some of which give us myrrh
and olibanum, others mastic and terebinth,
the brilliant varnishes of the East, mangoes,
cashew nuts and pistachio nuts, and the
balsam of capevi. Gum benjamin, or
benzoin, come from a laurel, and gum ladanum
from a cistus; storax is from an ebony
plant; and gum copal, used by painters as a
varnish, and no gum at all, by the way,
comes from an American tree, while our
common resin is the inspissated juice of pine,
— in other words, hardened turpentine. Gum
Arabic, from an acacia; tragacanth, and gum
senegal, animé, balsam of Peru, and balsam of
tolu (scarcely to be ranked as gums, though),
and frankincense, from the pinus tæda,
complete our catalogue.

Turning back to the ebonies, or ebenaceæ,
we find the famous lotus ranged with them
as a diospyrus, literally, the God-pear fruit;
but the lotus is not a gum, neither is the
manna of the Arabian tamarisk, which yet
may stand here as among the exudations of
trees.

The umbelliferæ are very fertile for man's
uses. Hemlock is one of them, and assafœtida
is the hardened milky juice of another.
Carraway and coriander seeds, dill, aniseed,
cummin, celery and parsley, and fennel, and
more household plants than we can name, are
of this order. Senna is from the leaves of
two different plants, but both are leguminous;
liquorice is the root of another of these pod-
plants; from the same order come tamarinds,
Turkish and Tonquin beans, fenugreek, animé
—the manna of the camel's-thorn, an acacia,
the fruit of the carob-tree or Saint John's
bread, besides peas and beans, clover, lucerne,
scarlet runners, and some of our loveliest
flowers. The nettle tribe hold among them
the bread-fruit tree, which gives cloth and
bread together; the gigantic brosimum, with
fruit equal to flesh for consistency and nutriment,
and with its weird-looking snake-wood
heart;  the banyan-tree, or holy fig of India;
all kinds of mulberry-trees, home and foreign;
fig-trees; hemp, and hops; all of the same
natural order as the common stinging-nettle
of our hedges, and as that venomous daoun
setan, or devil's leaf of Timor, which stings
men to death like a prickly bunch of serpents.

Isonandra gutta gives gutta percha; a fig-
tree (ficus elastica), a kind of India rubber;
but the real caoutchoue comes from the
hevea guianensis. From a bindweed we
get scammony; from poppies, opium; from a
soap-wort, that delicious Litchi fruit, not long
ago imported for the first time from the
Indian Archipelago; from gentian, bitters
to help frail digestions; from the camphor-
tree (cinnamomum camphora of Japan), the
composing draughts which soothe nervous
ladies in hysterics. Canel is the bark of the
canella; cinnamon, the inner bark of a
laurel; mace and nutmegs grow together,
—nut and shell covering of the myristica
moschata; and cloves and allspice come
from the myrtle tribe. From the agave
is made a liquor called pulque; the famous
Chinese medicine ginseng is from an ivy,
panax; strychnine is found in the seeds of
strychnos nux vomica; Ipecacuanha
(psychotria) is one of the cinchonaceæ—the same
tribe as produces quinine, coffee, and the sweet
essence, rondeletia; yams grow ready for
roasting in an order by themselves; and the
cow-tree, called by the Spaniards palo de vaca,
yields a milk to wash all the rest down. The