king from contact with the pretty child!

"Now," said our host, "will you touch the plant?"

Rising to do so, we approached it with one hand extended, and before
it had come fairly in contact, the nearest spray and leaves wilted
visibly.

"The plant knows the child," said the doctor, "but you are a
stranger."

It was a puzzling experience, which seemed to endow the mimosa with
human intelligence.

One brings away especially a vivid memory of the brilliant scarlet and
golden bloom which covers the flamboyer so densely as almost to hide
from view its foliage of velvet green. Only in far-away, mid-ocean
Hawaii does the traveler see this gorgeous tree so perfectly
developed.

The former superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens near Kandy,
whither we shall take the reader in due time, is a scientific
botanist, and an enthusiast in his profession. He tells us that he
classified nearly three thousand indigenous plants, which is double
the flora of Great Britain, and about one tenth of all the species in
the world yet described. Thirty of these are declared to be found only
upon this island. If correct, this is certainly a very remarkable
fact, and forms an additional incentive for exploration on the part of
naturalists.

Any reader of these pages who can conveniently visit Cambridge, Mass.,
should not fail to enjoy the unique and comprehensive collection of
specimens representing the flora of Ceylon, now in the Agassiz Museum.
The material is glass, although it seems to be wax, but so perfectly
has the work been done, under direction of Professor George L.
Goodale, of Harvard College, as to be indeed realistic. We have called
this collection unique, and it is absolutely so. Bostonians can find
no more charming local attraction with which to entertain appreciative
visitors from abroad than this in the department of botany at the
institution named.

There is a constant unvarying aspect of green pervading the scenery of
Ceylon, owing to the perennial nature of the vegetation. The trees do
not shed their leaves at any fixed period of the year. The ripe and
withered foliage drops off, but it is promptly replaced by new and
delicate leaves, whose exquisite hues when first expanding rival the
blossoms themselves in beauty of color. If fruit is plucked, a flower
quickly follows and another cluster ripens,--Nature is inexhaustible.
There is no winter interval or sleep for the vegetation, no period of
the sere and yello