rned than
the _savans_.

This lets us down easily to the more familiar uses of this plant
divine. By the Nile, in early days, the water-lily was good not merely
for devotion, but for diet. "From the seeds of the Lotus," said Pliny,
"the Egyptians make bread." The Hindoos still eat the seeds, roasted
in sand; also the stalks and roots. In South America, from the seeds
of the Victoria (_Nymphaea Victoria_, now _Victoria Regia_) a farina
is made, preferred to that of the finest wheat,--Bonpland even
suggesting to our reluctant imagination Victoria-pies. But the
European species are used, so far as we know, only in dyeing, and as
food (if the truth be told) of swine. Our own water-lily is rather
more powerful in its uses; the root contains tannin and gallic acid,
and a decoction of it "gives a black precipitate, with sulphate of
iron." It graciously consents to become an astringent, and a styptic,
and a poultice, and, banished from all other temples, still lingers in
those of AEsculapius.

The botanist also finds his special satisfactions in our flower. It
has some strange peculiarities of structure. So loose is the internal
distribution of its tissues, that it was for some time held doubtful
to which of the two great vegetable divisions, exogenous or
endogenous, it belonged. Its petals, moreover, furnish the best
example of the gradual transition of petals into stamens,
--illustrating that wonderful law of identity which is the
great discovery of modern science. Every child knows this peculiarity
of the water-lily, but the extent of it seems to vary with season and
locality, and sometimes one finds a succession of flowers almost
entirely free from this confusion of organs.

Our readers may not care to know that the order of Nymphaeaceae
"differs from Ranunculaceae in the consolidation of its carpels, from
Papaveraceae in the placentation not being parietal, and from
Nelumbiaceae in the want of a large truncated disc containing
monospermous achenia"; but they may like to know that the water-lily
has relations on land, in all gradations of society, from poppy to
magnolia, and yet does not conform its habits precisely to those of
any of them. Its great black roots, sometimes as large as a man's arm,
form a network at the bottom of the water. Its stem floats, an airy
four-celled tube, adapting itself to the depth, though never stiff in
shallows, like the stalk of the yellow lily: and it contracts and
curves when seed-time