The largest, and, on the whole, the most attractive of the Museums is No. I., whose red face looks across the Pond to the Palm House. Its staircase is adorned with a window that reminds one of the _rebus_ designs with which mediæval builders recorded their names in a material pun, for this, removed from the Guildhall and presented to the Gardens by Alderman Cotton, displays on stained glass the stages in the growth and manufacture of cotton. The catalogue contains over five hundred entries and thousands of specimens, most of them capable of instructing even Macaulay’s schoolboy. A large part of the collection was transferred here from the India Museum at South Kensington; but all quarters of the world are represented. Here we may see in various states, tea, coffee, cocoa, wine, tobacco, hops, nutmegs, cloves and other more or less familiar friends, with some not so well known in Britain, such as _maté_, the Paraguayan tea, which begins to be introduced among us, while it goes out of fashion in Argentine cities, still drunk all day long on the _campos_, where also the half-savage Gaucho takes too kindly to “square face” gin and to the gramophone that drowns the notes of his native guitar. Here we may indulge due disgust over outlandish intoxicants: the hemp-plants yielding “bang” and “hashish,” which are in the East what gin and absinthe are in the West; the poppy, that is a drug to us but elsewhere a ruinous dissipation; the coca leaves, the chewing of which gives a Bolivian Indian strength to go on for leagues without food, “but thereof comes in the end despondency and madness”; the kava root of the South Seas, which, first well chewed by strong-jawed young men or girls, then steeped in water, gives an infusion like soapsuds flavoured with Gregory’s powder, a luxury not much appreciated by white men, especially after seeing its preparation, and usually denied to women and youngsters, but ceremoniously presented in coco-nut shells to the grave and reverend seniors, whom a skinful of it affects with a peculiar drunkenness, in the legs rather than the head. Many medicinal plants here will give us new ideas or old qualms: the liquorice root, yielding what is still in our country districts known as “Spanish juice”; the senna shrubs, that flourish hardily in deserts to furnish black draughts once too much imported into British nurseries; the castor-oil plant, that bears such big clumps of flowers blooming under a tropical sun “too fairly for so foul effect”; the precious quinine, which by bold adventurers was stolen from Peruvian monopoly to thrive on Indian hills and elsewhere. Passing by such exhibits with a shudder, Masters Sandford and Merton will be glad to learn how many doctors nowadays do not much dissent from O. W. Holmes’s dictum that if all drugs, except quinine and a few other specifics, were at the bottom of the sea, it would be so much the better for human health.