The connection between war and botany is, at first, not specially obvious, and yet a very clear bit of testimony to their relation was disclosed by the siege of Paris.  Two naturalists have published a Florula Obsidionalis, which, as its name partly indicates, is a catalogue of the accidental flora of the late investment of Paris.  They reckon in their list not less than one hundred and ninety species before unknown to the neighborhood of the French capital, whereof fifty-eight are leguminous (such as peas, beans, etc.), thirty-four are composite, thirty-two are plantes grasses, and sixty-six belong to other families.  Almost all are to be found chiefly on the left bank of the Seine, though also discoverable at Neuilly and in the Bois de Boulogne.  Of course, these new-comers are all accounted for as the produce of seeds brought by the German army.  They will gradually die out; and yet some few may remain as permanent conquerors of the soil, since among the flora of Paris is still reckoned one plant whose seed was brought into France by some Russian forage-train in 1815.

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As the impudence, dishonesty, laziness and rapacity of servants at watering-places have long been familiar subjects of satire, it is just to say a word on the other side in favor of some extreme Northern resorts.  At the White Mountains, for example, the waiters and waitresses are of a better class than is generally met.  Some of the young girls are farmers’ daughters, who go to the hotels to see the fashions and earn a little pocket-money.  The colored cook at one of the great houses teaches dancing during the winters.  Not a few are school-teachers, others students at country academies, who pass their vacation in this way in order to earn enough to buy text-books or pay the winter’s tuition.  Many of them are more intelligent and well educated than some of the shoddies they wait upon.  They are usually quicker in movement and of more retentive memory than the average American waiter; and though each has a great deal to do at times, yet even during the tremendous moment of dinner they contrive to find a few little intervals for harmless flirtations in the dining-room.  They are for the most part well-mannered too, and if they talk to you of each other as “this lady” or “that gentleman,” what is it more than some waiters do with far less reason?  The New Hampshire villages become versed every summer in the latest imported fashions, thanks to the quick eyes of the hotel waitresses.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Lars:  A Pastoral of Norway.  By Bayard Taylor.  Boston:  Osgood & Co.