Those who love beautiful plants, and to watch them in their behaviour through all their various forms, always have a rich treat in the natural order, Melastomaceae, to which this beautiful novelty belongs. They are remarkable as being of little service to man, although there are well on to a thousand species known to and named and described by botanists; though perhaps this lack of utility comes from their chief home being among people who are satisfied to know little, and whose chief boast is that they live in climates where about all they have to do in order to live is to lie under palm trees, and eat what falls around them. They want little, hence have little inducement to discover how these plants may minister to human wants of which they know nothing. The plants are wholly tropical or sub-tropical, less than a dozen penetrating the territory of the United States, of which the very pretty Deer Grass, or Meadow Beauty, Rhexia Virginica is a familiar example. Perhaps there might be valuable dye-plants among them.

Some of them have succulent berry-like plants among them, and one of them so stains the mouth on eating, that the fact has given the name to the genus from which the whole order has been named - Melastoma; that is Greek for "black mouth." But if, as the poet says, " Beauty is its own excuse for being," these plants are abundantly useful, for some of our most charming conservatory plants are from among this order. They are usually of regular habits of growth, profuse in flowering, and with flowers that are gay and attractive. Then the foliage of many is particularly attractive, and gives us some of our most valuable leaf plants. The leaves of most of the family are very interesting, from the three-nerved character.

Very few orders have such leaves arranged opposite each other on the stem, though there are others with three leaves arranged alternately; and this character, taken together with peculiar stalked and bent anthers, will almost always tell the young botanist that he has a Melastomaceous plant.

Medinilla Curtisii.

This very pretty new species was introduced by Messrs. Veitch & Son, who furnish us with the following account thereof:

"A beautiful stove flowering shrub introduced by us from Sumatra through Mr. Curtis. It is a bushy plant of rather slender habit with erect shoots and subpendulous branchlets, furnished with ovate-oblong bright green leaves with reddish midribs. The flowers are produced in great numbers in terminal and lateral panicled cymes on flower stalks of a beautiful coral red. Each flower is about half an inch in diameter and has an ivory white, almost undivided calyx and a creamy white corolla of five roundish oblong petals which show to great advantage the central tuft of purple stamens. The neat and compact habit of the plant, the profusion with which its chaste flowers are produced, and which continue in perfection for many weeks in the autumn, render this Medinilla one of the most valuable stove shrubs' of recent introduction".