I can not rid myself of the thought that with the Victoria, as with all its attendant lilies, the hand of the care-taker is necessary. A very Amazon itself, it needs an Amazonian setting. We look for a naked baby on the largest pad, and the infant’s mother in a canoe gathering Victorian seed-vessels. These, with a troop of scarlet ibises, spur-winged jacanas, and chattering macaws, are all needed to complete the picture. With them, the world has perhaps nothing more striking to offer; without them, the plant is too bizarre, too like the eagle when shorn of its priceless gift of liberty. Not so with the lotus; it accords well with the unpretending valley of the Delaware, is not a thing apart, but the culmination, as it were, of Nature’s vigor here, and seemingly not out of place even when it fills a meadow mud-hole. One species is, as we have seen, truly American, native and to the manner born, even if introduced and cared for by the Indian along our Eastern seaboard; but now, where the wildness of the Indians’ day has been long lost to us, and novelty is sweet, we rejoice to find the lotus of the East is no longer a stranger in the land. In a now nameless little stream, filling the narrow interval between low hills, till within a few years there grew little but the yellow dock, white arrow-leaf, blue pickerel-weed, and here and there a lily. It was simply a typical muddy brook, such as is found everywhere in the “drift” areas of the State. Every plant was commonplace; but far be it from me to infer that any one was mean or meritless. Not a flower named but is really beautiful; yet, save the lily, none would be gathered for nosegays. Why, as is so common, speak disparagingly of the yellow nuphar, our familiar splatter-dock? Let it be gathered with care, with no fleck of tide-borne mud upon its petals, and see how rich the coloring, and with what grace the flower has been molded. I doubt not, were the nuphar fragrant, it would be extolled as it deserves, as, were the rose fetid, it would be despised. Thus one writer remarks, “From its filthy habits it has been called, with some justice, the frog-lily.” But wherein lies its filthiness it is hard to determine. It has no decided preference for waters too stagnant for its fairer cousin the white nymphæa; and then smirched lilies are no novelties. A pond may be too muddy for even them to preserve their purity, yet they will grow as luxuriantly as their unstained sisters. That the nuphar may remain longer in the polluted waters than will the nymphæa does not argue that it prefers such conditions, and never a frog but loved clean water better than foul. Botanists should not speak slightingly of the animal world; it too has its beauties. And the reference to the frog shows a woful ignorance of that creature.