the act of blowing, or putting forth flowers or blossoms, called also flower- ing. The blossoming of the Glastonbury thorn plentifully on Christmas-day morning, is a vulgar error; owing to this, that the plant, besides the usual blossoming in the spring, sometimes puts forth a few white tran- sient blossoms in the middle of winter. For the blof- soming of the rose of Jericho on the same day, as it is commonly held in England, or in the time of midnight mats, as it is held in France, is somewhat more than an error, being really a fraud on one side, and a super- fition on the other. This role, whose leaves are only clothed and shrivelled up in winter, will, at any time, upon setting its pedicle in water, expand and blossom a-new; because the pedicle being spongy imbibes the fluid apace, and thus fills and swells out the shrivelled leaves: which property some monks have turned to good account.