service, has eaten and drank a tea which needs no sugar. At least, in the fascinating Report which he has presented to Sir H. Parkes, and which has just been published by Parliament to teach travellers how to observe, while recording the result of his hunt after white tree-wax, he says:—“I come now to the last class of tea, the discovery of Mr. Baber. If my memory is not at fault, he was regaled by a priest on Mount Olmei with tea possessing both the flavor of milk and sugar. It may have been in the very temple on the mountain-side in which I am now writing that Mr. Baber was agreeably surprised. At anyrate, I am sipping an infusion which is without doubt sweet, and which is declared by the priest to be brewed from a naturally-prepared tea-leaf. It is a large dark-brown leaf, and is very sweet when chewed. The people at the bottom of the mountain, whom I first questioned regarding this tea, asserted that the leaves were sweet because they were first steeped in molasses; but the balance of evidence, as I have since found from extensive inquiry, is against any such artificial preparation. The tree is said to grow in only one gorge in the mountain, whence the leaves are brought for sale.” What will Mincing Lane give for a shipload of that tea, the very existence of which, till drunk and eaten, the dealers would have regarded as a solemn joke? Men are wise about silk-culture in Italy and Southern France; but they do not know, as the Chinese told Mr. Hosie, that the mulberry-leaf is too strong food for baby-silkworms, and that the wretched little insect, if you want plenty of silk, should be fed-up in earliest infancy on the leaves of a silkworm thorn-tree, fifteen feet high, unknown to Europeans, though Mr. Hosie found it everywhere in Szechuen, growing by the road-sides, and as hardy as the thorns, of which it is a variety, usually are. How much difference in annual cash-earnings would the importation of that thorn make in Lombardy? Why should not the Governments, which so steadily map-out the seas, even combining to do it, institute a patient and exhaustive search for new grasses able to produce flour, and new vegetables fit for eating? They might not produce many Mr. Hosies, who, if the Members of Parliament read his Report, will very soon find himself as well-known in London as any popular author; but they also might. The men like Mr. Fortune and Mr. Hosie, the men whose observation nothing escapes, are not rare among botanists, and would need but little encouragement to carry on for years a persistent inquiry which, if carefully limited to defined objects, would almost certainly produce some considerable result. The work, it will be said, is one for Societies; but it seems a pity to waste the great resource which Governments possess in the wide distribution of their agencies, and in their power of carrying-on their inquiries without reference to time. There will be a Legation at Pekin and Lima, and Jeddo, and