In his description of fruits or flowers woven on a textile, let not the youthful or unwary writer be led astray by older men with a reputation howsoever high for learning other than botanical. Some years ago we were reading with great delight a tale about some things that happened in the third century, and near Carthage. Though avowedly a fiction, most of its incidents were facts, so admirably put together that they seemed to have been drawn by the pen of one who had lived upon the spot. But taking one of his personages to a walk amid the hills running down to the shores of North Africa, the writer leads him through a narrow glen tangled over head, and shaded with sweet smelling creepers and climbers, among which he sees the passion-flower in full bloom. Now, as every species--save one from China of late introduction--that we have of this genus of plants, came to the old world from the new one, to speak of them as growing wild in Africa, quite fourteen hundred years before they could have been seen there, and America was known, is spoiling a picture otherwise beautifully sketched. [459] Layard’s Discoveries at Nineveh, abridged, p. 46. [460] Ibid. p. 245. [461] Pp. 132, 239. [462] The Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud, or Biblical Legends of Mussulmans compiled, &c., by Dr. G. Weil, pp. 183, 184. [463] Letters, t. i. p. 105, London, 1763. * * * * * With some, there perhaps may be a wish to know what was the origin of this collection.