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IN MEMORY OF MARIANNE NORTH. 833
were luing with white lichen, and the Latter weighed down with
cones as big as one's head. The smaller cones of the male trees
were shaking off clouds of golden pollen, and were full of small
grubs, which, I suppose, attracted the flights of parroquets I saw
so busily employed about them. These birds are said to be so
clever that they can find a soft place in the great shells of the cone
when ripe, into which they get the point of their sharp beak, and
fidget it until the whole cracks, and the nuts fall to the ground. It
is a food they delight in, and men, too, when properly cooked, like
chestnuts. The most remarkable thing about the trees was the
bark, which was a perfect child's puzzle of knobby slabs of different
sizes, with five or six decided sides to each, and all fitted together
with the neatness of a honeycomb. I tried in vain to find some
system on which it was arranged. The great heads, before the
flowers come out, are wrapped up in covers of white kid tinted with
salmon, getting darker as they fall aside and the lemon buds push
themselves out, and the first flowers which open romid the base of
the spikelet, near the stalk, are of the purest turquoise-blue ; the
new rosette which replaces them is darker, metallic blue, and then
all the others seem to get more and more green and faded the
farther they get from the stalk, with a background of brown bracts
or leaves, the original white kid covers."
On her return from South America in 1885, Miss North at once
commenced hanging the new paintings, which, including those from
South Africa and the Seychelles, are some two hundred in number.
Among the latter was the " Capucin," an imperfectly known
sapotaceous tree, which had been refeiTed by Prof. Hartog to
Mimusopx. The drawing of the fohage and fruit brought by Miss
North, with the flowers, which were subsequently sent at her
request, enabled Sir Joseph Hooker to determine the tree to.be a
new genus, which he appropriately named (Ic. PI. 1173) Northea,
in honour of the artist. Miss North is also commemorated in
Criniim Xorthianum Baker and Xcpenthes Xorthiand Hook, f., the
former of which was described from her drawings,—the highest
compliment which could be paid to their scientific accuracy.
In 188G the Government printed a new catalogue, including the
above additions, and withdrew the large number of unsold copies
of the third edition; they also returned the cheque which Miss
North had actually tendered to buy up the whole stock of this now
obsolete catalogue.
It may be interesting to add here some statistics of the contents
of the gallery. Out of about 200 natural orders of flowering plants,
as limited in Bentham and Hooker's ' Genera Plantarum,' IIG are
represented in this collection of paintings, and the plants depicted
belong to no fewer than 727 different genera. With regard to
species, the number actually named is under 900 ; but as specific
names have only been given to such as could be identified with ease
Of without too great an expenditure of time, this number is considerably
below the total number painted. They are included in
818 paintings ; and when we kuow that they were all painted
between 1872 and 1HH5, and that they by no means represent all