On June 1st, a slit of one inch and a half in length was made in the stem of a lilac tree, the branch being about an inch in diameter.  The slit extended to the pith.  Fifteen or twenty grains of moistened arsenic were introduced, the cut was closed, and the stem retained in its original position by osier ties.  On the 8th, the leaves began to roll up at the extremity; on the 28th, the branches were dry, and, in the second week of July, the whole of the stem was dry, and the tree itself dead.  In about fifteen days after the first, a tree, which joined the former a little above the earth, shared the same fate, in consequence of its connexion with that into which the poison had been introduced.  Other trees similarly cut, but without having been poisoned, suffered no kind of injury.

M. Marcet’s experiments upon vegetable poisons are no less interesting, and still more wonderful, as indicating a degree of irritability in plants somewhat similar to that which depends on the nervous system in animals.  After having ascertained that the bean plants could exist in a healthy state for five or six days, if immersed in the same quantity of spring water, he tried them with five or six grains of opium dissolved in an ounce of water, the consequence of which was, that in the evening the leaves had dropped, and, by the middle of next day, they were dead beyond recovery.  Other vegetable poisons of the narcotic class produced a similar effect.  Hemlock was equally fatal, and six grains of dry powdered foxglove, in an ounce of water, began to operate, by wrinkling some of the leaves of the bean in a few moments, which it completely killed in twenty-four hours.  Oxalic acid or salt of sorrel, though found in common and wood sorrel, and a great many plants, proved a very fatal poison to others.  The absorption of one-tenth of a grain, killed a rose branch and flower in forty—­eight hours.—­

Quar.  Jour. of Agriculture.

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NOTES OF A READER

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KNOWING PEOPLE.

How happily do these few lines characterize a certain set of people who pick up news from “good authority,” and settle the fate of the nation over strong potations of brandy and water, or Calvert’s porter, forgetting that “people who drink beer, think beer.”  Suppose a question of great public interest afloat:—­“Reports are abroad, precisely of the proper pitch of absurdity, for the greedy swallowing of the great grey-goggle-eyed public, who may be seen standing with her mouth wide open like a crocodile, with her hands in her breeches-pockets, at the crosses of cities on market-days, gluttonously devouring whatever rumour flings into her maw—­nor in the least aware that she is all the time eating wind.  People of smallish abilities begin to look wiser and wiser every day—­their nods seem more significant—­in the shaking of their heads there is more of Burleigh—­and in short sentences—­that sound like apophthegms—­they are apt to impose themselves on their credulous selves as so many Solomons.”