Alleged Lilies After visiting Palestine some years ago and in
the course of botanical wanderings admiring the carpets of scarlet anemones, I was quite con- vinced that by the "lilies" of the Bible was meant the anemones ; but there is a truer explanation. A correspondent, who possesses a hortus siccus of Palestine flowers made a hundred years ago, tells me that the Syriac word is probably generic, and is more truly translated as " flowers of the field." There are next-to-no lilies, so far as I could discover, in Palestine. The anemone flowered in all sorts of places, the scarlet sort along the railways and flat open plains,- and the purplish among copses, as near Haifa and Acre. Second perhaps to the anemones come the cyclamens on the upper slopes. It is remarkable that almost all the good work done in the natural history of those regions is to the credit of the English. If only Jew and Arab would enter into this sort of rivalry with us!
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