of the black Briony, and the glossy heart-shaped leaves of this plant cover with one mass of verdure many a time-stained trunk, and give to it a grace and beauty which afford delight, not only to the lover of flowers, but to him also who regards simply the general picturesque effect of nature, without very carefully marking its details.

Yet climbing plants are by no means a characteristic of the English landscape, for they are few compared with those of tropical regions, or like those of the sunny climes of southern Europe. Our two principal climbers are the Ivy and the Hop. Were our scenery deprived of the former, we should indeed lose one of its most ornamental plants. Yet its graceful wreath is doubtless often injurious to the tree which its strong stems clasp too tightly, though on the other hand it holds together the ruined walls of the building, and preserves from utter decay. Many of our old castles and churches are greatly indebted to it, not only for beauty, but for preservation and shelter from the elements.

"Who loves not,

At happy distance to discover thus

The house of God uplift its ancient walls,
Wreathed in the verdant honours of the year?
Within that sacred fane have race on race,

The children of the upland and the dale,

Devoutly worshipped; and beneath the mounds-
The grassy mounds which stud the village yard—
Withdrawn to rest at last."

The finest ivy, that at least which has the largest stems and boughs, is ever thus associated with past times; for if not found on the ancient walls, it is clambering over the oldest tree, and wreathing even the highest bough of the woodland patriarch with its elegant and verdant spray. Amid its shelter the blackbird and the thrush sing their earliest songs; and in its flowers, in the later year, many of the insect world find almost their only food.

The hop is less ornamental, for besides that it is not always green, it is much less frequent in our wild scenery, and perhaps is not truly an indigenous plant. Its long stems and rough leaves climb about the thickets and hedges, and their yellow clusters of cones, with their sweet scent, hang in July among our wild flowers, or in more luxuriance and strength grow amid the leaves which entwine the tall poles of the cultivated hop garden, and send forth on the autumnal air its most delicious of odours.

How different, however, from these plants are the tall climbers of the hotter regions of the world. There they reach to the tops of trees hundreds of feet high, hanging thence their glowing bells or stars. Some of the Lianas, or Rope plants, have leafless branches forty or fifty feet in length; sometimes they hang perpendicularly from the high summits of the trees, at others they are stretched obliquely like the cordage of a ship, and are climbed by the tiger-cats and monkeys with wondrous agility. In New Zealand a climber renders the forest almost impenetrable, and entwines round a gigantic tree 220 feet high. The very grasses have, many of them, a climbing habit, and wind around massive trunks. In the old world, especially in India and the neighbouring islands, grass plants of the different species of Rattan and Calamus twine to the very tops of trees, like the climbing plants of the new world, pass on to the next tree, and descending its stem to the ground, rise again towards its summit. Some of these have, on measurement, been found five or six hundred feet in length, and the longest cannot have been measured.

In South America the profusion of climbing plants is so great as almost to exclude the light; and so numerous are the flowers that it is impossible to tell to what species they belong. The Passion and Trumpet flowers, and those of the mountain Ebony trees, mingle with the orchises and plants like our arums, and with the long shaggy silver grey tufts of the gigantic mosses called Spanish Beard and the magnificent ferns. The author of "A Residence in Sierra Leone," graphically describes the appearance of those extraordinary climbers called country ropes, during the withered season. "They can," she says, "be compared to nothing else than iron, leaden, or leathern pipes (according to the rusty-grey or brown or black colour of their different barks), all twisted and re-twisted, plaited and woven, with every grotesque and fantastical form, until the whole space under the trees, as far as the eye can reach, appears occupied by a succession of enormous nets of irregularly-sized meshes; or if you could imagine the rigging of a ship in the most remarkable disorder, the ends of the highest ropes dangling down on the deck, and tying themselves in a thousand intricate knots to great lengths of thick coire, which in their turn are wound up one mast and down another in every strange and varied convolution." Sometimes, this author says, these stems look like huge serpents, while the spiral folds, in other cases, so encircle a young tree, that it looks like a wooden pillar, rich in antique carving.

In popular language, the climbing plant is spoken of as parasitic, and many a poet has sung of that "graceful parasite," the Ivy; but the botanist regards as parasitic plants such only as, growing upon living vegetables or animals, and sending down roots into their very substance, derive from it their nourishment. The climbing plants of our land and its parasitic species, though often confounded, have in fact no affinity, either in nature or in outward appearance, for none of our parasitic plants climb at all. In the tropic vegetation to which we have alluded, few of the climbers are strictly parasitic; neither are our mosses and ferns, for they are nourished by rains and dews, and such small portions of soil as may gather on the crumbling ruin, or lie amid the crevices of the bark of the

tree.

With the exception of many of the Fungus or Mushroom tribe, and the green bough of the misseltoe, we have no native parasitic plant of much beauty; while our parasites are so few in number, that by omitting the funguses which require a volume to themselves, they may all be described even in a short paper. True parasites may be divided into two kinds, the first of which have green leaves, acting like the leaves of ordinary plants, and serving as organs of respiration and digestion. The only plant in our country of this description is the misseltoe, and there are but two known genera of this kind. The other is the genus Loranthus, which, in several countries of warmer climate, not only takes the place of our misseltoe, but, unlike this plant, is also a very conspicuous feature of vegetation, its large scarlet flowers shining amid the dark-green leaves of the tree on which it grows. Meyen describes a species of Loranthus, which covers with a scarlet carpet a large candelabra-like cactus, whose snow-white flowers, eight or nine inches long, projecting from it, present a beautiful object to the eye. The other form of parasite is the one which includes most of our native kinds. In this the plants have no leaves, and the scales which are on some of their stems are either of brown or some other dim hue. The leafy-green parasites elaborate food for themselves; the brown, or scaly parasites, obtain it in a state of elaboration from other species. There is one circum

stance very remarkable in these plants, for though many of them are exposed to the greatest light, some of them even rising up on the chalk cliffs, which on the summer day seems one of the brightest of all earth's spots, yet most of them so resist the ordinary action of light, that they never show on stem or flower either a bright-green or other brilliant tint. The brown, almost as deep as that of the withered leaf, the sickly-looking yellow tinge, the dim purple, or the dingy white, being almost the only colours which they have to exhibit. Equally remarkable is the fact, that though in many cases they fix themselves on the roots of small plants, such as the Trefoils or the Lady's Bed Straw, whose stems and flowers are so delicate, still some of them have stems two feet in height, and as thick as a walking-stick.

Among these parasites, the plants called Broom Rapes are the most conspicuous, and often do they attract the notice of the wanderers in the country. Tall, thick, succulent stems of a dim-reddish hue, having scales of the same colour, bear about half-way down spikes of flowers of dingy purple and yellow, mostly scentless; but in one species, the Clove Broom Rape, bearing a sweet odour of cloves. Ask the countryman who is working near them in the field the names of these plants, and if he do not call them Strangle-weeds, he will probably give you some local name, expressive of disgust, for it is well known that these plants destroy those on which they affix themselves. The Leguminous tribe, such as have their seeds in pods, and their flowers shaped something like that of the pea or bean, are chiefly infested by these parasites, and any of them may be cultivated in the garden if planted by the furse or broom. The largest broom rape is two feet high, and adheres not only to the roots of these plants, but also to those of the clove. On some lands in Flanders, where it is abundant, the farmer is altogether deterred by it from cultivating the clove. This kind has a large thick, fleshy, somewhat bulbous root, from which a number of brittle fibres issue. The bulb fastens itself to the woody roots of the broom, or the more fleshy roots of the clove, and the fibres clasp around it. Other species grow on the yellow bedstraw, the woolly kidney vetch, or on the nettle or hemp, the lilac scabious, or various other flowers of our highways and fields.

Very similar to the Broom Rapes is our Scaly Toothwort, which, however, does not grow on open plains, but hides in the deepest recesses of the woods. It is a curious leafless plant, of humble growth, with whitish scales and purplish flowers. The upright succulent stems spring up in groups of three, four, or more in number from the roots of the elm, hazel, or other trees. Not only are its colours dim when growing in the shadow of the wood, but it is remarkable that the rows of flowers which grow down one side of the stem are as often turned away from the light as towards it, contrary to the well-known habit of plants in following the light.

Mr. Dovaston, who planted this toothwort on the roots of the hazel, and after four or five years' trial of patience succeeded in getting it to grow there, remarks of it-" It will turn pink or purple when very much exposed to the light; for having cut away some of the hazel branches to bring it more in view of the walk, the sunbeams in a few days turned it so very pinky and purple, that some ladies were very much struck with the beauty and delicacy of its colours, though the plant itself is rather of a repulsive and cadaverous aspect." This flower is called by country people "Clown's Lunywort."

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MEDICINAL Springs have obtained a sanction for their usefulness, in the concurrence of physicians and the experience of mankind, from the earliest

VOL. II.

I

periods of antiquity down to the present time; magnificent temples were erected upon the spots where they were originally discovered, and tutelary spirits or divinities were created to preside over their administration and effects. Crowds of suffering individuals, whom the baffled physicians had relinquished as incurable, here found a fresh stimulus to their hopes, not unfrequently realized by a restoration to health-that blessing,

"Most courted, most despised,

And but in absence duly prized."

In modern times, we find that a reliance upon the efficacy of mineral waters has increased rather than diminished, and that nearly the whole tide of professional, as well as public experience and opinion, is in their favour; and when we consider the change of scene and air, of food and drink, of rising and retiring, of exercise and conversation,-in short of the whole moral and physical conditions which surround the patient, we are not surprised at the cures in so many cases effected, the consequent popularity of such means of health, and the rapid rise into consequence of localities where they abound.

From having been from its medicinal springs thus devoted to health and recreation, does Cheltenham owe its present notoriety and prosperity; for over the whole of the spot, indeed over the whole vale of Gloucester in which it stands, an extensive forest once flourished, extending to the banks of the Avon near Bristol. In still earlier times this forest was inhabited by savage beasts, and the manor of Cheltenham had to pay to King Edward the Confessor a grant of three thousand loaves of bread, for his "dogs employed in keeping them down by hunting." The timber of this immense district was particularly valuable, and the oaks of Dean were so widely celebrated and renowned, that Evelyn tells us, " in Queen Elizabeth's reign an ambassador was purposely sent from Spain to procure their destruction, either by negotiation or treachery." The valley was also once celebrated for its vines, the grapes of which were manufactured into wines, equal, according to William of Malmesbury, "to the rich and luscious ones of France." To these the poet Drayton alludes when he remarks,

"But of her vines deprived, now Gloucester loves to plant

The pear-tree everywhere;”

and consequently the perry of the locality is now as celebrated as the produce of the vine in the days of old.

The vale of Gloucester is still beautifully wooded; its beeches and lime trees are very luxuriant, and next to the medicinal character of its springs, the picturesqueness of its neighbourhood makes Cheltenham a very popular place of residence for visitors. Leckhampton Hill, at the foot of which Cheltenham spreads, is the nearest ridge of the Cotswold Hills, and from its summit, which rises very precipitately in some parts, especially near the detached piece of rock called "The Devil's Chimney," is commanded a magnificent view of the widely-spreading valley, with its three centres of life, Gloucester, Cheltenham, and Tewkesbury; while, when the day is clear, still further north, across the silver Severn, the towers of Worcester Cathedral may be seen rising loftily into the air.

We find, from the mention of it in that invaluable record of our Saxon England, the "Doomsday Survey," that when the kingdom fell into the hands of the Norman Conqueror, Cheltenham was of some little consequence; it was then a royal manor, and gave its name to a hundred as it still does. Of the condition of the place as a town, the notices are few and scanty;