The Lotus of the ancients has given rise to many interesting inquiries among the learned; but, like the Pale Violet of Horace and of Virgil, and the Hyacinth of the Greek and Latin poets, we are still without any certain or accurate knowledge upon the subject. In this short Essay, which I presume to lay before the Society to which I have the honour to belong, I propose to shew from ancient authors, that plants of very different characters were known to the Greeks by the name of Lotus: but the particular object which I have in this dissertation, is to shew that the Indian plant known to the Greeks by the name of Κύαμος and Αἰγύπτις κύαμος, and to us by Nelumbium speciosum, or Cyamus nelumbo, was never called Lotus by the ancient Greeks or Egyptians; and I have been the more desirous to establish this fact, as Mons. Savigny, de l'lnstitut d'Egypte, in his learned paper in the Annales du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, has considered it to be a Lotus of the ancients; and in all modern works which have fallen in my way, I have observed a repetition of the same error.