[095] Signifying the dew of the sea.  The rosemary grows best near the sea-shore, and when the wind is off the land it delights the home-returning voyager with its familiar fragrance.

[096] Perhaps it is not known to all my readers that some flowers not only brighten the earth by day with their lovely faces, but emit light at dusk.  In a note to Darwin’s Loves of the Plants it is stated that the daughter of Linnaeus first observed the Nasturtium to throw out flashes of light in the morning before sunrise, and also during the evening twilight, but not after total darkness came on.  The philosophers considered these flashes to be electric.  Mr. Haggren, Professor of Natural History, perceived one evening a faint flash of light repeatedly darted from a marigold.  The flash was afterwards often seen by him on the same flower two or three times, in quick succession, but more commonly at intervals of some minutes.  The light has been observed also on the orange, the lily, the monks hood, the yellow goats beard and the sun flower.  This effect has sometimes been so striking that the flowers have looked as if they were illuminated for a holiday.

Lady Blessington has a fanciful allusion to this flower light.  “Some flowers,” she says, “absorb the rays of the sun so strongly that in the evening they yield slight phosphoric flashes, may we not compare the minds of poets to those flowers which imbibing light emit it again in a different form and aspect?”

[097] The Shan and other Poems

[098] My Hindu friend is not answerable for the following notes.

[099]
    And infants winged, who mirthful throw
    Shafts rose-tipped from nectareous bow.

Kam Deva, the Cupid of the Hindu Mythology, is thus represented.  His bow is of the sugar cane, his string is formed of wild bees, and his arrows are tipped with the rose.—­Tales of the Forest.

[100] In 1811 this plant was subjected to a regular set of experiments by Dr. G. Playfair, who, with many of his brethren, bears ample testimony of its efficacy in leprosy, lues, tenia, herpes, dropsy, rheumatism, hectic and intermittent fever.  The powdered bark is given in doses of 5-6 grains twice a day.—­Dr. Voight’s Hortus Suburbanus Calcuttensis.

[101] It is perhaps of the Flax tribe.  Mr. Piddington gives it the Sanscrit name of Atasi and the Botanical name Linum usitatissimum.

[102] Roxburgh calls it “intensely fragrant.”

[103] Sometimes employed by robbers to deprive their victims of the power of resistance.  In a strong dose it is poison.

[104] It is said to be used by the Chinese to blacken their eyebrows and their shoes.

[105] Mirabilis jalapa, or Marvel of Peru, is called by the country people in England the four o’clock flower, from its opening regularly at that time.  There is a species of broom in America which is called the American clock, because it exhibits its golden flowers every morning at eleven, is fully open by one and closes again at two.