United States or Gibraltar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They used to come home with their hands full of flowers, and this resulted in a vehement attack of botany, a taste that has lasted all our lives, together with the hortus siccus to which we still make additions, though there has been a revolution there as well as everywhere else, and the Linnaean system we learnt so eagerly from Martin's Letters is altogether exploded and antiquated.
On the other side of the house matters were still worse. What a dusty world it was, when about sunset we became cool enough to creep into it! Flowers in the court looking fit for a 'hortus siccus; mummies of plants, dried as in an oven; hollyhocks, once pink, turned into Quakers; cloves smelling of dust. Oh, dusty world!
I calculated, perhaps, too strongly upon the desire of scientific people in Bombay to promote objects of general utility at home, and see little chance, unless I do every thing relating to the collecting, planting, packing, and transmitting the plants with my own hands, of succeeding in sending any thing to England. Indeed, I find a difficulty in procuring a hortus siccus.
In this hollow tree the wood-duck reared her brood, and slid away each day to forage in yonder fen. In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a hortus siccus.
A salt crust was seen at intervals on the surface of the sand at the margin of the lake, or as it might more properly be called, the Desert; but this appearance might either be caused by water brought down by the Siccus, and other large watercourses spreading over the saline soil in times of flood, or by rain, and appeared to me no proof of its ever being covered with water for any period of time.
I give and bequeath to the College of Serampore the whole of my museum, consisting of minerals, shells, corals, insects, and other natural curiosities, and a Hortus Siccus; also the folio edition of Hortus Woburnensis, which was presented to me by Lord Hastings; Taylor's Hebrew Concordance, my collection of Bibles in foreign languages, and all my books in the Italian and German languages."
Until this summer I had not seen the Mississippi, nor set foot upon a prairie. To gratify a natural interest, and to gain some title for addressing a body of practical naturalists and explorers, I have made a pilgrimage across the continent. I have sought and viewed in their native haunts many a plant and flower which for me had long bloomed unseen, or only in the hortus siccus.
There were said to be four qualities of touch, calidus, humidus, frigidus, et siccus, or hot, cold, moist, and dry, according to which persons were active or passive in the exercise of the fascinum.
Quite independently I could not help seeing that among savages and peasants we had mythology, not in a literary hortus siccus, but in situ. Mannhardt, though he appreciated Dr. Tylor, had made, I think, but few original researches among savage myths and customs. His province was European folklore. What he missed will be indicated in the chapter on 'The Fire-Walk' one example among many.
After crossing the low ridge above Prewitt's Springs, lat. 31 degrees 45 minutes, forming the left bank of the basin of the Siccus, the plain extended between the north and east as far as the eye could reach, and the lurid glare of the horizon, as we advanced northward, plainly indicated the approach of Lake Torrens, which, from the direction I had followed, I expected to turn about this point.
Word Of The Day