Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

same artist, is called ' The Fertilisation of Egypt,' mean- ing, of course, the rising of the Nile. A huge unclothed man with a dog's head is praying to the star Sirius. A note explains this by saying ' the Abb6 La Pluche observes that as Sirius, or the Dog-star, rose at the time of the commencement of the Hood, its rising was watched by the Astronomers and notice given of the approach of the inundation by hanging the figure of Anubis, which was that of a man with a dog's head, in all the Egyptian temples.' Erasmus Darwin's mind was evidently fasci- nated, as was common with all the scientific men of the day, by the fertilisation of plants. In one of his notes he says, ' The vegetable passion of love is agreeably seen in the flower of the Parnassia (Grass of Parnassus), in which the males alternately approach and recede from the female' (a practice not wholly unknown to many beside the innocent Parnassia), ' and in the flower of Nigella.' We call it now Love-in-the-Mist, ' in which the tall females bend down to their dwarf husbands' (a picture some- times seen in modern drawing-rooms). Darwin goes on to say, ' I was surprised this morning to observe, amongst Sir Brooke Boothby's valuable collection of plants at Ashbourne, the manifest adultery of several females of the plant Collinsonia, who had bent themselves into contact with the males of the same plant in their vicinity, neglectful of their own.' The plate and note of Gloriosa superba I have mentioned elsewhere. As an outcome of the extraordinary effect of Linnseus's work on thinking minds at the end of the last century, the book is of great- interest, though we should not call it poetry in the modern sense. Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of our great Darwin, who did for the middle of this century so much more than even Linnaeus did for the end of the last. 1778. ' Miscellanea Austriaca, by Nicolai Joseph! Jacquin.' This is the earliest Jacquin book that I have. 64 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN It is in two small volumes of note-books, with all the illustrations at the end. The text is in Latin ; but this is of no consequence, as Jacquin's books are all botanical, not horticultural, and their botany is obsolete. This remarkable man, Nicholas Joseph Jacquin, whose in- dustry must have been untiring, was born at Leyden in 1727, and educated there at the University for the medical profession. This meant in those days the highest botanical education which could be obtained. He went to Vienna, at the suggestion of a friend, to practise medicine, but when there his great botanical knowledge brought him to the notice of Francis I. This emperor seems to have been a great patron of botany and gardening, the fashionable combination of the day. He sent Jacquin to the West Indies for six years to collect plants for the Schonbrunn Gardens, paying his expenses. Jacquin did not die till 1817, leaving an unfinished work, ' Eclogse Plantarum Eariorum/ the only one of Jacquin's books that has a German as well as a Latin text. The second volume was not published till 1844, by Edouardus Fenzl, long after Jacquin's death. The colour and painting are very inferior to Jacquin's work.