There is no improbability in the opinion that the Indians cultivated the plant. They were certainly practical horticulturists as well as growers of field crops. It was of an Indian orchard that the pioneer settler of a New Jersey town wrote when he stated, in 1680, that peaches were “in such plenty that some people took their carts a peach-gathering. I could not but smile at the conceit of it. They are a very delicate fruit, and hang almost like our onions that are tied on ropes.” The peach was probably introduced into Florida by the Spaniards, and in about a century or less its cultivation by the Indians had reached northward as far as New Jersey. The nuts and roots of the lotus could as readily be transported as the pits of the peach, so no obstacle was in the way. Intertribal intercourse was very far-reaching, as shown by the occurrence of peculiar forms of stone implements common in distant localities, and Mexican obsidian and Minnesota red pipe-clay along our eastern Atlantic seaboard. While yet we have the Indian in mind it is well to refer also to the very significant fact that these people took the golden-club (_Orontium aquaticum_) from the tide-waters and planted it in upland sink-holes, miles from the nearest spot where it grew naturally. Perhaps we can never be positive about the matter. If a fiction, it is so pleasing a one I trust it will never be overthrown. To stand upon the bank of a pond and see in it traces of both an aboriginal flower-garden and a farm certainly adds to the interest that surrounds the plant. We have it on the authority of Emerson that Thoreau expected to find the _Victoria regia_ about Concord. It was but an extravagant method of expressing his opinion of the merits of that region; but I am not so sure that the Victoria is the most beautiful of all aquatic plants. Finding it growing and blooming every summer in an open field near by, I have surely the right to express my preference for another. It and the lotus grow in the same waters, and I love the lotus more, give it the first place among flowers, although there floats upon the surface of these same waters royal red lilies of India, tooth-leaved white lilies from Sierra Leone, the golden one of Florida, and, perhaps more magnificent than all, the splendid purple lily of Zanzibar. I can start across-lots and quickly come upon them all in an open field; but it is the lotus that holds me.