SOME years ago, travellers gave us startling accounts of a tree, the very odor of which was death to animated creatures. Nothing would grow beneath its immediate shade, and all in its vicinity was seared and blighted. Well, when subsequently Richardson wrote of it, that he had often sat amongst its branches and smoked his cigar, we seemed to be acting very leniently in giving him and his story over to Munchausen or Gulliver; and it was not until the writer himself had the opportunity of, in some respects, imitating Richardson, that he became convinced that the celebrated Upas-tree of Java had been most scandalously libelled.

Has not our own most beautiful Kalmia latifolia been similarly injured? Thus 1 inquired, on reading the following note in Darby's Botany of the Southern States: "The leaves of the Kalmias are all poisonous; nevertheless, some animals, it is said, eat them with impunity, and that, too, to such an extent as to make their flesh poisonous to man, it becoming so impregnated with the poison of the leaves." Now, there seems to me something wonderful in this. My farm hand, one day, accounted to me for the death of one of his hogs, that he was sure it must have eaten a rat that must have tasted some phosphorescent poison I had set for it one day before; but, I am sure, his untutored brain would never have supposed that the poison had been in the flesh of the rat, instead of his stomach, and perhaps weeks or months before. This is the nearest case to that mentioned by Darby that I ever knew of, and yet, how far off?

But Darby only gives it as " it is said," and I am inclined to believe that all any of us know about its poisonous property is on the ipse dixit of some one else - as far back, perhaps, as some original Indian, hundreds of years ago. As far back as I can recollect, I was cautioned not to go near or smell the flowers, and told that the honey the bees extracted from them was poisonous. Had those who so taught me, lived in this region, bandied the magnificent bouquets, or, as our children do, worn the rural wreaths they fantastically make of them, their fears would undoubtedly be very alarming. To this day, the English, with all their fondness for it, admit it only in guarded places, not exposed to the incursions of children, and where, like a caged lion, its grandeur may be seen, but its power not be felt As we know this to be all "nonsense," why may not all the rest be that is said derogatory to it?

As to its being poisonous to cattle, I may mention that, in one of my botanical excursions last year, I came on a wood, in Delaware State, in which were some score of cows. Poor beasts! - there was little in that wood to satisfy the demands of a hungry appetite, but the wood abounded with laurel, as Pennsylvanians call it, and not a leaf was to be seen on the plants; they had eaten every vestige of green about them, even to the young shoots. If I recollect rightly, this was on Ridley Creek, and, I presume, the batter, if not the milk itself, finds its way from that region to the Philadelphia market, and, if the statement, as "it is said," by Darby, be correct, with what a serious result to our citizens! for, assuredly, if the flesh can be impregnated so easily, how much more so butter and milk!

But I again repeat, I do not believe it to be poisonous. I have given it a chance on my own life, which it declined to accept, and as I do not lay claim to the constitution of Mithridates, I conclude it deemed itself unequal to the task.

I should be glad to learn that the experience of others differs from my own; for, although I dislike to see a flower I so thoroughly admire connected with such unpleasant associations, I shall be better satisfied if I feel assured that it deserves it.

[It was the opinion of Nuttall, and many others, that the popular notion on this subject was decidedly erroneous, and that the "leathery" leaves, being indigestible, was the cause of the injury, and even, occasionally, of the death of animals that had partaken of the laurel. A popular error of this kind, if it be one, should be investigated and exterminated as soon as possible. - Ed].