But it is in the state of Texas, and especially near San Antonio de Bejar, that those immense desert spaces commence which occupy all the northern region of Mexico. The southern districts of Texas offer in their prevailing landscapes a mixture of beautiful prairies and shady woods. Among the plants peculiar to humid and turfy localities, I may particularize the _Sarracenias_, a group of remarkable exogens, whose leaves are hollowed out into tubes or pitchers, open at the upper end, and streaked with bands of different colours; the Eriocaulons, a kind of rush, carrying their small flowers in spherical capitals on the summits of their tall branching stems; and the Nelumbios (_Nelumbium calophyllum_), aquatic plants of unusual beauty, American congeners of the celebrated Lotus, the "insane root which takes the reason prisoner." The nuts are wholesome and edible, and the root-stocks are also occasionally eaten. These plants are likewise found, in analogous habitats, in Mississippi and Louisiana, accompanied by the light-green Magnolia, the Dog-berry tree of Florida, several Wax-berries, and the Sassafras laurel, now acclimatized in Europe, and whose bark is employed as I have said, medicinally, while its wood and roots are made use of by turners and toy-manufacturers. [Illustration: VEGETABLE LIFE IN TEXAS. 1. Nelumbium calophyllum. 3. Eriocaulon flavidulum. 2. Sarracenia purpurea. 4. Laurus sassafras.] Prairies abound in Texas, wide rolling sweeps of grassy sward, with an apparently interminable horizon, unbroken by rock, or wood, or river--leagues upon leagues of rank thick grass where countless herds are depastured, and where the hunter still finds game worthy of his deadly rifle. Among those which skirt the Bay of Matagorda, and extend in the vicinity of Victoria, Gonzalès, and Seguin, M. Trécul discovered an ample variety of Compositæ; of Gramineæ, more especially those belonging to the generæ _Poa_, _Spartina_, _Dactyloctenium_; Cyperaceæ, Euphorbias, Cucumbers, and Gourds. From the Texan Prairies our European gardeners have of late years received a Graminea of the genus _Panicum_, the _Black Mosquito Grass_, which by its long creeping rhizomes may be employed with undoubted success to arrest the inland movement of the Dunes and shifting sandy shores. The yellow water-lily (_Nuphar lutea_) spreads its fine leaves on the surface of the Texan streams, in beautiful companionship with the _Nuphar advena_ and the _Nymphæa odorata_. In the same localities vegetates a weak variety of our European _Sagittaria_, and the _Pistia spatulata_ spreads itself upon the water, like our English Duckweed, both being members of the family _Pistaceæ_.