s--the deer, the bears, the wolves, the wild-cats, and the
panthers too, still inhabiting the wild mountain forests that inclose
the village."

* * * * *

PROFESSOR BLUME, of Leyden, has been elected a member of the French
Academy, to fill a vacancy in the section of botany. Among the
candidates were Professor John Torrey, of New-York, and Professor Gray
of Harvard College. Professor Blume presented on the occasion his
splendid new work on botany: a Flora, in four volumes, folio, of the
peninsula of India, the islands of the Sonde, and of the Indian
Archipelago; the title is _Rumphia_, the contents being collected from
the seven folios of the botanist Everard Rumph, published in the middle
of the last century. Professor Blume resided many years in Batavia, and
added the results of his own scientific and extensive research
throughout Java and the Archipelago. On the 24th ult. M. de Juissen
submitted to the Academy an interesting report on the work, in which he
says, "A poisonous tree, the _Upas-Antiar_, has been the subject of
numerous fictions, by which it has acquired great celebrity. It has
therefore attracted the attention of many travellers, who have
dissipated the stories, as Mr. Blume does, with piquant details." He
explains a part of the terrible reputation of the tree, by the fact that
the volcanic soil emits, on different spots, deleterious gases, which
have a fatal effect on animal life--an effect erroneously imputed to the
adjacent trees. Their juice, indeed, possesses highly energetic
properties. The birds often take refuge on their elevated tops, without
the least injury. [A specimen of the Upas tree has been recently brought
to the United States by an officer of the navy, and it is alleged that
while it does not poison the atmosphere, its sap is quite as fatal to
life as its effluvia has been represented to be.] The natives poison
their arms with the juice of another Upas, _Strychnos tieute_. Mr. Blume
visited a mangrove tree--_ficus India_--of gigantic dimensions and
remote antiquity, which is regarded and preserved as a sort of religious
monument. The branches spread a shade over a vast area, and form
themselves for the parasite growth of a multitude of other plants on
their surface. The professor obtained license to herborize on the top.
He collected thirty-seven species, without reckoning lichens and mosses,
but being restricted as to time, did not inspect half of the di