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One reason why I think so small a quantity of manure will not succeed, is based on the theory of excrementitious secretion. Decandolle proved that this secretion took place, but he did not succeed in proving that it poisoned the land for a similar crop.

Burman relates that, in the latter country, when cow's milk is wanting, the milk of this asclepias is used; and that the ailments commonly prepared with animal milk are boiled with its leaves. It may be possible, as Decandolle has well observed, that the natives employ only the juice that flows from the young plant, at a period when the acrid principle is not yet developed.

In 1496, before the wars ended, one Pedro de Bracamonte, a captain under De Lugo, captured a 'belle sauvage, who made her escape after a few days. The valuable material, which resists damp and decay for centuries, and which Decandolle declares would grow in Scotland, is rapidly disappearing from the Pinals.

This liana grows in profusion on the humid declivities of the mountains of Unturan and Achivaquery. Decandolle is right in suspecting that different species of smilax are gathered under the name of sarsaparilla.

The bare enumeration of the names of the men who were the great lights of science in the latter part of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth century, of Herschel, of Laplace, of Young, of Fresnel, of Oersted, of Cavendish, of Lavoisier, of Davy, of Lamarck, of Cuvier, of Jussieu, of Decandolle, of Werner and of Hutton, suffices to indicate the strength of physical science in the age immediately preceding that of which I have to treat.

The elder DeCandolle had conceived the idea of the struggle for existence, and, in a passage which would have delighted the cynical philosopher of Malmesbury, had declared that all Nature is at war, one organism with another or with external Nature; and Lyell and Herbert had made considerable use of it.

M. Decandolle observes, that this species, which is not found in Portugal, but grows on the Mediterranean shores of France, Spain, and Italy, in Asia Minor, and in Barbary, would be better named Pinus mediterranea. It composes the principal part of the pine-forests of the south-east of France, where Gouan and Gerard have confounded it with the Pinus sylvestris.

This acquisition was part of the Linnæan reform.... ‘Tournefort,’ says Decandolle, ‘appears to have been the first who really perceived the utility of fixing the sense of terms in such a way as always to employ the same word in the same sense, and always to express the same idea by the same words; but it was Linnæus who really created and fixed this botanical language, and this is his fairest claim to glory, for by this fixation of language he has shed clearness and precision over all parts of the science.’