Their cleverness in gardening has one outlet of which we are ignorant. We cut our boxwood, and do not save it for the Palm-Sunday festival. The Chinese cultivate plants for holy purposes. The ponds and other bodies of water so numerous in a country where rice is the chief food, gives them opportunity to cultivate in abundance a magnificent water plant, the lotus of the Indus, the sacred plant of the Hindoos. The god Buddha is always represented reposing on the lotus flower, whose root signifies vigor, its great leaves growth, its odor the sovereign spirit, its brilliancy love. Thus it is customary to offer to the idols the beautiful flowers of the lotus; besides, its culture offers a double advantage, its fruitful root and its sweet grains (the beans of Egypt) being used in Chinese cookery. The fruit of one variety of the lemon tree is produced from the separated carpels, which are disjoined at the base of the lemon and developed separately, like the fingers of a hand. This hand is among the Chinese that of their god; _Fo-chou-kan_, as it is called, signifies the sweet smelling hand of Buddha. A writer assures us that the gardeners aid, by bands which are early fastened on the fruit, in bringing about this paying division; they are capable of it. This union of two very different feelings, the greed for gain and piety, ought not to astonish us much. The simple affection which they have for plants seems to be a kind of religious sentiment. Each plant inspires them with a kind of mystic love which affects certain of their poems. Their literature represents to us a delight in flowers which we do not easily understand. They are enraptured at the sight of a plant, and seek by continued observation to understand its development. One is not surprised at the degree of skill to which such an exalted taste leads their gardeners. The emperors have always especially encouraged the production of vegetables and orchards, as well as general agriculture. “I prefer,” said the emperor Kang-hi, “to procure a new kind of fruit or of grain for my subjects rather than to build an hundred porcelain towers.” Two centuries before him one prince published an herbarium containing the plants suitable to cultivate in time of famine, after having consulted with the peasants and farmers.