odoriferous products of the garden and the forest.

Pathologically considered, the use of perfumes is in the highest degree
prophylactic; the refreshing qualities of the citrine odors to an
invalid is well known. Health has often been restored when life and
death trembled in the balance, by the mere sprinkling of essence of
cedrat in a sick chamber.

The commercial value of flowers is of no mean importance to the wealth
of nations. But, vast as is the consumption of perfumes by the people
under the rule of the British Empire, little has been done in England
towards the establishment of flower-farms, or the production of the raw
odorous substances in demand by the manufacturing perfumers of Britain;
consequently nearly the whole are the produce of foreign countries.
However, I have every hope that ere long the subject will attract the
attention of the Society of Arts, and favorable results will doubtless
follow. Much of the waste land in England, and especially in Ireland,
could be very profitably employed if cultivated with odor-bearing
plants.

The climate of some of the British colonies especially fits them for the
production of odors from flowers that require elevated temperature to
bring them to perfection.

But for the lamented death of Mr. Charles Piesse,[A] Colonial Secretary
for Western Australia, I have every reason to believe that flower-farms
would have been established in that colony long ere the publication of
this work. Though thus personally frustrated in adapting a new and
useful description of labor to British enterprise, I am no less sanguine
of the final result in other hands.