LISSANTHE SAPIDA.

The Australian cranberry is a handsome bush, from six to nine feet high; it grows in forest lands near the Blue Mountains; the flowers are handsome; and the berries of a very delicate peachbloom colour, having something of the consistency and taste of the Siberian crab.

This singular fruit, which may not improperly be called the chesnut bean, was lately found by Mr. Cunningham upon the banks of the Brisbane river,

in Moreton Bay, New South Wales. It is the produce of a large and handsome tree, which belongs to a new and undescribed genus, though in some particulars it seems allied to Robinia. The leaves are pinnated, upon long footstalks; the leaflets entire, and there is a terminal one. The flowers, which are papilionaceous, are produced at the bases of the leaves in considerable numbers, not unlike those of the Robinia hispida. These flowers are succeeded by pods, very large, hard, and of a brownish, or cinnamon colour. These pods contain a variable number of roundish seeds or beans, compressed on the one side, and covered with a thin loose shell of a chesnut colour; when roasted, they have very much the flavour of chesnuts; and in a country where edible fruits of indigenous growth are few, they are at least a curiosity.

We have thus completed a rapid sketch of the various fruits of the world. As the commerce of mankind increases, the number of those valuable substances which we may secure to ourselves by cultivation will increase also; and, at the same time, we shall diffuse our own vegetable productions over the globe. In New South Wales the gardens of the settlers are filled with the plants which they cultivated in their native country. Colonization universally produces this good; and thus the intercourse of mankind may in time make the world one vast garden, in which all the blessings of a bounteous Providence shall be naturalised, as far as climate, or the science of man, can render those plants common to all, which were originally the property of a few.

London: Printed by W. CLOWES, Stamford-street.