Young monkeys, still strong in jaw and gastric juice, will pay more attention to the different kinds of nuts, too reckless dealings with which has often caused nauseous draughts to be “exhibited”; and they may be surprised to learn how the triangular Brazil nuts of our shops are not independent growths, but neatly packed in parcels of two dozen or so in a shell like a cannon ball, so hard and heavy as to crack a man’s skull on which it should fall. The youth of this generation will not be so much interested as an old fogey is in carob pods, believed to be the locusts that fed St. John, and that still feed men and cattle in some parts of the world. The other day I had a shock of mild surprise in seeing dried locusts for sale in a back street shop-window, from which I had supposed them long vanished; but in my period of unpampered stomachs and scrimp pocket-money they had a great sale among schoolboys, as giving for a minimum of expenditure a maximum of sweet, stiff chewing, with this additional recommendation, that the seeds, scrunched under one’s mischievous heel, made a squeaking noise subversive of discipline--a trick, let us trust, never tried on Mr. Barlow. He will here find a cue to explain how some fruits that are to us mere luxuries more or less digestible, such as chestnuts and dates, make the staple food of certain regions, not only raw but dried, ground into flour and baked into bread; the stones of dates also being crushed as fodder for North African cattle. Then here we have the cassava, which in its native state is deadly poison, but can be prepared to feed wholesomely many tribes of Africans and South Americans, and to supply us with our toothsome tapioca. Here indeed are poisonous preparations enough to kill all Kew, including the juice of that upas tree of whose deadly shade a cock-and-bull story took such deep root in our language that it still affords a fictitious trope for orators. Mr. Barlow might find much to say on the many useful or curious plants here represented, notably the various trees and creepers whose juice, once oozing to waste in leafy wildernesses, now becomes more and more important through the increasing demand for india-rubber in our greedy manufactures. But his hearers might begin to yawn before he had got through one-tenth of over a hundred cases here laid out for inspection; so, as soon as the shower be over that has driven us into this instructive refuge, let us go forth into the open air, only pausing to look respectfully on the portraits of botanists and explorers, among which the tutor may point to Sir Joseph Banks, or Baron von Humboldt, while the pupils will want rather to identify Captain Cook; the general public may be most concerned to see Charles Darwin or Marianne North; and those who have had the patience to read through the foregoing chapters can pick out George III., Lord Bute, the Aitons, the Hookers, and other worthies there touched upon in connection with Kew’s history.