It would not be difficult to make some of the more important characters of the two families I have mentioned so clear, even to a person unacquainted with botany, that he would be enabled readily to distinguish any plant belonging to them. Very different is it with the following, the last group, the Jussieuan family of nettle-plants, or Urticaceæ. The plants belonging to this vary in the most striking manner in their external forms, from the smallest, most insignificant weeds, like our common pellitory of the wall and our nettles, to vast and stately trees like the breadfruits (Artocarpus integrifolia and incisa), which, with their wide-stretched branches and broad, beautifully formed leaves, overshadow the huts of the South Sea Islander, who lives upon their savory fruit. As in the family of the spurges, only some few plants bestow in their seed a pleasant nut-like kernel (as Aleurites triloba in the Moluccas, Conceveiba guianensis in South America); as in the Apocynaceous group, several trees afford cooling, juicy, and therefore highly valued fruits to the inhabitants of hot regions (Carissa Carandas in the East Indies, Carissa edulis in Arabia, etc.), so the family of the Urticaceæ includes the strangest multiplicity of fructifications. The little oil grains of the hemp, the green grape-like bunches which gracefully adorn the slender twining hop, the aromatic mulberry, the sweet fig, the useful bread-fruit, all those so various forms belong to one group of plants, and the botanist traces in all the same fundamental structure, however incongruous these manifold shapes may appear to the eye of the uninitiated. One peculiarity alone extends without exception throughout all the species of this large order, namely, the presence of fine but strong bass-fibres in the bark. The German name for muslin, Nessel-tuch (nettle-cloth), denotes the source from whence the fibre of which it is made was originally obtained (Urtica cannabina), and the skilful industry of the gentle Tahitan prepares the most delicate stuff, without spinning-wheel or loom, from the fine white bass of the auté of paper-mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera).