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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Proserpina, Volume 2, by John  Ruskin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Proserpina, Volume 2
+       Studies Of Wayside Flowers
+
+Author: John  Ruskin
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2005 [EBook #15088]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROSERPINA, VOLUME 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Keith Edkins and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+PROSERPINA.
+
+STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS,
+
+WHILE THE AIR WAS YET PURE
+
+_AMONG THE ALPS, AND IN THE SCOTLAND AND
+ENGLAND WHICH MY FATHER KNEW_.
+
+BY
+
+JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,
+
+HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRISTCHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS
+CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.
+
+VOL. II.
+
+1888.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+VIOLA.
+
+1. Although I have not been able in the preceding volume to complete, in
+any wise as I desired, the account of the several parts and actions of
+plants in general, I will not delay any longer our entrance on the
+examination of particular kinds, though here and there I must interrupt
+such special study by recurring to general principles, or points of wider
+interest. But the scope of such larger inquiry will be best seen, and the
+use of it best felt, by entering now on specific study.
+
+I begin with the Violet, because the arrangement of the group to which it
+belongs--Cytherides--is more arbitrary than that of the rest, and calls for
+some immediate explanation.
+
+2. I fear that my readers may expect me to write something very pretty for
+them about violets: but my time for writing prettily is long past; and it
+requires some watching over myself, I find, to keep me even from writing
+querulously. For while, the older I grow, very thankfully I recognize more
+and more the number of pleasures granted to human eyes in this fair world,
+I recognize also an increasing sensitiveness in my temper to anything that
+interferes with them; and a grievous readiness to find fault--always of
+course submissively, but very articulately--with whatever Nature seems to
+me not to have managed to the best of her power;--as, for extreme instance,
+her late arrangements of frost this spring, destroying all the beauty of
+the wood sorrels; nor am I less inclined, looking to her as the greatest of
+sculptors and painters, to ask, every time I see a narcissus, why it should
+be wrapped up in brown paper; and every time I see a violet, what it wants
+with a spur?
+
+3. What _any_ flower wants with a spur, is indeed the simplest and hitherto
+to me unanswerablest form of the question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow
+in spires, and are crowded together, and have to grow partly downwards, in
+order to win their share of light and breeze, one can see some reason for
+the effort of the petals to expand upwards and backwards also. But that a
+violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might grow straight up, if
+she pleased, should be pleased to do nothing of the sort, but quite
+gratuitously bend her stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by
+her waist, as it were,--this is so much more like a girl of the period's
+fancy than a violet's, that I never gather one separately but with renewed
+astonishment at it.
+
+4. One reason indeed there is, which I never thought of until this moment!
+a piece of stupidity which I can only pardon myself in, because, as it has
+chanced, I have studied violets most in gardens, not in their wild
+haunts,--partly thinking their Athenian honour was as a garden flower; and
+partly being always fed away from them, among the hills, by flowers which I
+could see nowhere else. With all excuse I can furbish up, however, it is
+shameful that the truth of the matter never struck me before, or at least
+this bit of the truth--as follows.
+
+5. The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or
+dales). But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight
+except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to
+nightingale--and, after all, was London bred. But Viola's beloved knew
+where violets grew in Illyria,--and grow everywhere else also, when they
+can,--on a _bank_, facing the south.
+
+Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are _meadow_ flowers, the
+violet is a _bank_ flower, and would fain grow always on a steep slope,
+towards the sun. And it is so poised on its stem that it shows, when
+growing on a slope, the full space and opening of its flower,--not at all,
+in any strain of modesty, hiding _itself_, though it may easily be, by
+grass or mossy stone, 'half hidden,'--but, to the full, showing itself, and
+intending to be lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost of its
+soft power.
+
+Nor merely in its oblique setting on the stalk, but in the reversion of its
+two upper petals, the flower shows this purpose of being fully seen. (For a
+flower that _does_ hide itself, take a lily of the valley, or the bell of a
+grape hyacinth, or a cyclamen.) But respecting this matter of
+petal-reversion, we must now farther state two or three general principles.
+
+6. A perfect or pure flower, as a rose, oxalis, or campanula, is always
+composed of an unbroken whorl, or corolla, in the form of a disk, cup,
+bell, or, if it draw together again at the lips, a narrow-necked vase. This
+cup, bell, or vase, is divided into similar petals, (or segments, which are
+petals carefully joined,) varying in number from three to eight, and
+enclosed by a calyx whose sepals are symmetrical also.
+
+An imperfect, or, as I am inclined rather to call it, an 'injured' flower,
+is one in which some of the petals have inferior office and position, and
+are either degraded, for the benefit of others, or expanded and honoured at
+the cost of others.
+
+Of this process, the first and simplest condition is the reversal of the
+upper petals and elongation of the lower ones, in blossoms set on the side
+of a clustered stalk. When the change is simply and directly dependent on
+their position in the cluster, as in Aurora Regina,[1] modifying every bell
+just in proportion as it declines from the perfected central one, some of
+the loveliest groups of form are produced which can be seen in any inferior
+organism: but when the irregularity becomes fixed, and the flower is always
+to the same extent distorted, whatever its position in the cluster, the
+plant is to be rightly thought of as reduced to a lower rank in creation.
+
+7. It is to be observed, also, that these inferior forms of flower have
+always the appearance of being produced by some kind of mischief--blight,
+bite, or ill-breeding; they never suggest the idea of improving themselves,
+now, into anything better; one is only afraid of their tearing or puffing
+themselves into something worse. Nay, even the quite natural and simple
+conditions of inferior vegetable do not in the least suggest, to the
+unbitten or unblighted human intellect, the notion of development into
+anything other than their like: one does not expect a mushroom to translate
+itself into a pineapple, nor a betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a
+snapdragon to soften himself into a lilac.
+
+8. It is very possible, indeed, that the recent phrenzy for the
+investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by
+this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with
+providentially disgusting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for
+every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth,
+or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the
+dissolution, of vegetable organism. But with these obscene processes and
+prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing
+whatever to do. I am amazed and saddened, more than I can care to say, by
+finding how much that is abominable may be discovered by an ill-taught
+curiosity, in the purest things that earth is allowed to produce for
+us;--perhaps if we were less reprobate in our own ways, the grass which is
+our type might conduct itself better, even though _it_ has no hope but of
+being cast into the oven; in the meantime, healthy human eyes and thoughts
+are to be set on the lovely laws of its growth and habitation, and not on
+the mean mysteries of its birth.
+
+9. I relieve, therefore, our presently inquiring souls from any farther
+care as to the reason for a violet's spur,--or for the extremely ugly
+arrangements of its stamens and style, invisible unless by vexatious and
+vicious peeping. You are to think of a violet only in its green leaves, and
+purple or golden petals;--you are to know the varieties of form in both,
+proper to common species; and in what kind of places they all most fondly
+live, and most deeply glow.
+
+"And the recreation of the minde which is taken heereby cannot be but verie
+good and honest, for they admonish and stir up a man to that which is
+comely and honest. For flowers, through their beautie, varietie of colour,
+and exquisite forme, do bring to a liberall and gentle manly minde the
+remembrance of honestie, comeliness, and all kinds of vertues. For it would
+be an unseemely and filthie thing, as a certain wise man saith, for him
+that doth looke upon and handle faire and beautiful things, and who
+frequenteth and is conversant in faire and beautiful places, to have his
+mind not faire, but filthie and deformed."
+
+10. Thus Gerarde, in the close of his introductory notice of the
+violet,--speaking of things, (honesty, comeliness, and the like,) scarcely
+now recognized as desirable in the realm of England; but having previously
+observed that violets are useful for the making of garlands for the head,
+and posies to smell to;--in which last function I observe they are still
+pleasing to the British public: and I found the children here, only the
+other day, munching a confection of candied violet leaves. What pleasure
+the flower can still give us, uncandied, and unbound, but in its own place
+and life, I will try to trace through some of its constant laws.
+
+11. And first, let us be clear that the native colour of the violet _is_
+violet; and that the white and yellow kinds, though pretty in their place
+and way, are not to be thought of in generally meditating the flower's
+quality or power. A white violet is to black ones what a black man is to
+white ones; and the yellow varieties are, I believe, properly pansies, and
+belong also to wild districts for the most part; but the true violet, which
+I have just now called 'black,' with Gerarde, "the blacke or purple violet,
+hath a great prerogative above others," and all the nobler species of the
+pansy itself are of full purple, inclining, however, in the ordinary wild
+violet to blue. In the 'Laws of Fésole,' chap, vii., §§ 20, 21, I have made
+this dark pansy the representative of purple pure; the viola odorata, of
+the link between that full purple and blue; and the heath-blossom of the
+link between that full purple and red. The reader will do well, as much as
+may be possible to him, to associate his study of botany, as indeed all
+other studies of visible things, with that of painting: but he must
+remember that he cannot know what violet colour really is, unless he watch
+the flower in its _early_ growth. It becomes dim in age, and dark when it
+is gathered--at least, when it is tied in bunches;--but I am under the
+impression that the colour actually deadens also,--at all events, no other
+single flower of the same quiet colour lights up the ground near it as a
+violet will. The bright hounds-tongue looks merely like a spot of bright
+paint; but a young violet glows like painted glass.
+
+12. Which, when you have once well noticed, the two lines of Milton and
+Shakspeare which seem opposed, will both become clear to you. The said
+lines are dragged from hand to hand along their pages of pilfered
+quotations by the hack botanists,--who probably never saw _them_, nor
+anything else, _in_ Shakspeare or Milton in their lives,--till even in
+reading them where they rightly come, you can scarcely recover their fresh
+meaning: but none of the botanists ever think of asking why Perdita calls
+the violet 'dim,' and Milton 'glowing.'
+
+Perdita, indeed, calls it dim, at that moment, in thinking of her own love,
+and the hidden passion of it, unspeakable; nor is Milton without some
+purpose of using it as an emblem of love, mourning,--but, in both cases,
+the subdued and quiet hue of the flower as an actual tint of colour, and
+the strange force and life of it as a part of light, are felt to their
+uttermost.
+
+And observe, also, that both, of the poets contrast the violet, in its
+softness, with the intense marking of the pansy. Milton makes the
+opposition directly---
+
+          "the pansy, freaked with jet,
+  The glowing violet."
+
+Shakspeare shows yet stronger sense of the difference, in the "purple with
+Love's wound" of the pansy, while the violet is sweet with Love's hidden
+life, and sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes.
+
+Whereupon, we may perhaps consider with ourselves a little, what the
+difference _is_ between a violet and a pansy?
+
+13. Is, I say, and was, and is to come,--in spite of florists, who try to
+make pansies round, instead of pentagonal; and of the wise classifying
+people, who say that violets and pansies are the same thing--and that
+neither of them are of much interest! As, for instance, Dr. Lindley in his
+'Ladies' Botany.'
+
+"Violets--sweet Violets, and Pansies, or Heartsease, represent a small
+family, with the structure of which you should be familiar; more, however,
+for the sake of its singularity than for its extent or importance, for the
+family is a very small one, and there are but few species belonging to it
+in which much interest is taken. As the parts of the Heartsease are larger
+than those of the Violet, let us select the former in preference for the
+subject of our study." Whereupon we plunge instantly into the usual account
+of things with horns and tails. "The stamens are five in number--two of
+them, which are in front of the others, are hidden within the horn of the
+front petal," etc., etc., etc. (Note in passing, by the '_horn of the
+front_' petal he means the '_spur of the bottom_' one, which indeed does
+stand in front of the rest,--but if therefore _it_ is to be called the
+_front_ petal--which is the back one?) You may find in the next paragraph
+description of a "singular conformation," and the interesting conclusion
+that "no one has yet discovered for what purpose this singular conformation
+was provided." But you will not, in the entire article, find the least
+attempt to tell you the difference between a violet and a pansy!--except in
+one statement--and _that_ false! "The sweet violet will have no rival among
+flowers, if we merely seek for delicate fragrance; but her sister, the
+heartsease, who is destitute of all sweetness, far surpasses her in rich
+dresses and _gaudy_!!! colours." The heartsease is not without sweetness.
+There are sweet pansies scented, and dog pansies unscented--as there are
+sweet violets scented, and dog violets unscented. What is the real
+difference?
+
+14. I turn to another scientific gentleman--_more_ scientific in form
+indeed, Mr. Grindon,--and find, for another interesting phenomenon in the
+violet, that it sometimes produces flowers without any petals! and in the
+pansy, that "the flowers turn towards the sun, and when many are open at
+once, present a droll appearance, looking like a number of faces all on the
+'qui vive.'" But nothing of the difference between them, except something
+about 'stipules,' of which "it is important to observe that the leaves
+should be taken from the middle of the stem--those above and below being
+variable."
+
+I observe, however, that Mr. Grindon _has_ arranged his violets under the
+letter A, and his pansies under the letter B, and that something may be
+really made out of him, with an hour or two's work. I am content, however,
+at present, with his simplifying assurance that of violet and pansy
+together, "six species grow wild in Britain--or, as some believe, only
+four--while the analysts run the number up to fifteen."
+
+15. Next I try Loudon's Cyclopædia, which, through all its 700 pages, is
+equally silent on the business; and next, Mr. Baxter's 'British Flowering
+Plants,' in the index of which I find neither Pansy nor Heartsease, and
+only the 'Calathian' Violet, (where on earth is Calathia?) which proves, on
+turning it up, to be a Gentian.
+
+16. At last, I take my Figuier, (but what should I do if I only knew
+English?) and find this much of clue to the matter:--
+
+"Qu'est ce que c'est que la Pensée? Cette jolie plante appartient aussi ou
+genre Viola, mais à un section de ce genre. En effet, dans les Pensées, les
+pétales supérieurs et lateraux sont dirigés en haut, l'inférieur seul est
+dirigé en bas: et de plus, le stigmate est urcéole, globuleux."
+
+And farther, this general description of the whole violet tribe, which I
+translate, that we may have its full value:--
+
+"The violet is a plant without a stem (tige),--(see vol. i., p.
+154,)--whose height does not surpass one or two decimetres. Its leaves,
+radical, or carried on stolons, (vol. i., p. 158,) are sharp, or oval,
+crenulate, or heart-shape. Its stipules are oval-acuminate, or lanceolate.
+Its flowers, of sweet scent, of a dark violet or a reddish blue, are
+carried each on a slender peduncle, which bends down at the summit. Such
+is, for the botanist, the Violet, of which the poets would give assuredly
+another description."
+
+17. Perhaps; or even the painters! or even an ordinary unbotanical human
+creature! I must set about my business, at any rate, in my own way, now, as
+I best can, looking first at things themselves, and then putting this and
+that together, out of these botanical persons, which they can't put
+together out of themselves. And first, I go down into my kitchen garden,
+where the path to the lake has a border of pansies on both sides all the
+way down, with clusters of narcissus behind them. And pulling up a handful
+of pansies by the roots, I find them "without stems," indeed, if a stem
+means a wooden thing; but I should say, for a low-growing flower, quiet
+lankily and disagreeably stalky! And, thinking over what I remember about
+wild pansies, I find an impression on my mind of their being rather more
+stalky, always, than is quite graceful; and, for all their fine flowers,
+having rather a weedy and littery look, and getting into places where they
+have no business. See, again, vol. i., chap. vi., § 5.
+
+18. And now, going up into my flower and fruit garden, I find (June 2nd,
+1881, half-past six, morning.) among the wild saxifrages, which are allowed
+to grow wherever they like, and the rock strawberries, and Francescas,
+which are coaxed to grow wherever there is a bit of rough ground for them,
+a bunch or two of pale pansies, or violets, I don't know well which, by the
+flower; but the entire company of them has a ragged, jagged, unpurpose-like
+look; extremely,--I should say,--demoralizing to all the little plants in
+their neighbourhood: and on gathering a flower, I find it is a nasty big
+thing, all of a feeble blue, and with two things like horns, or thorns,
+sticking out where its ears would be, if the pansy's frequently monkey face
+were underneath them. Which I find to be two of the leaves of its calyx
+'out of place,' and, at all events, for their part, therefore, weedy, and
+insolent.
+
+19. I perceive, farther, that this disorderly flower is lifted on a lanky,
+awkward, springless, and yet stiff flower-stalk; which is not round, as a
+flower-stalk ought to be, (vol. i., p. 155,) but obstinately square, and
+fluted, with projecting edges, like a pillar run thin out of an
+iron-foundry for a cheap railway station. I perceive also that it has set
+on it, just before turning down to carry the flower, two little jaggy and
+indefinable leaves,--their colour a little more violet than the blossom.
+
+These, and such undeveloping leaves, wherever they occur, are called
+'bracts' by botanists, a good word, from the Latin 'bractea,' meaning a
+piece of metal plate, so thin as to crackle. They seem always a little
+stiff, like bad parchment,--born to come to nothing--a sort of
+infinitesimal fairy-lawyer's deed. They ought to have been in my index at
+p. 255, under the head of leaves, and are frequent in flower
+structure,--never, as far as one can see, of the smallest use. They are
+constant, however, in the flower-stalk of the whole violet tribe.
+
+20. I perceive, farther, that this lanky flower-stalk, bending a little in
+a crabbed, broken way, like an obstinate person tired, pushes itself up out
+of a still more stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas-pipe
+of a stalk, with a section something like this,
+
+[Illustration]
+
+but no bigger than
+
+[Illustration]
+
+with a quantity of ill-made and ill-hemmed leaves on it, of no describable
+leaf-cloth or texture,--not cressic, (though the thing does altogether look
+a good deal like a quite uneatable old watercress); not salvian, for
+there's no look of warmth or comfort in them; not cauline, for there's no
+juice in them; not dryad, for there's no strength in them, nor apparent
+use: they seem only there, as far as I can make out, to spoil the flower,
+and take the good out of my garden bed. Nobody in the world could draw
+them, they are so mixed up together, and crumpled and hacked about, as if
+some ill-natured child had snipped them with blunt scissors, and an
+ill-natured cow chewed them a little afterwards and left them, proved for
+too tough or too bitter.
+
+21. Having now sufficiently observed, it seems to me, this incongruous
+plant, I proceed to ask myself, over it, M. Figuier's question, 'Qu'est-ce
+c'est qu'un Pensée?' Is this a violet--or a pansy--or a bad imitation of
+both?
+
+Whereupon I try if it has any scent: and to my much surprise, find it has a
+full and soft one--which I suppose is what my gardener keeps it for!
+According to Dr. Lindley, then, it must be a violet! But according to M.
+Figuier,--let me see, do its middle petals bend up, or down?
+
+I think I'll go and ask the gardener what _he_ calls it.
+
+22. My gardener, on appeal to him, tells me it is the 'Viola Cornuta,' but
+that he does not know himself if it is violet or pansy. I take my Loudon
+again, and find there were fifty-three species of violets, known in his
+days, of which, as it chances, Cornuta is exactly the last.
+
+'Horned violet': I said the green things were _like_ horns!--but what is
+one to say of, or to do to, scientific people, who first call the spur of
+the violet's petal, horn, and then its calyx points, horns, and never
+define a 'horn' all the while!
+
+Viola Cornuta, however, let it be; for the name does mean _some_thing, and
+is not false Latin. But whether violet or pansy, I must look farther to
+find out.
+
+23. I take the Flora Danica, in which I at least am sure of finding
+whatever is done at all, done as well as honesty and care can; and look
+what species of violets it gives.
+
+Nine, in the first ten volumes of it; four in their modern sequel (that I
+know of,--I have had no time to examine the last issues). Namely, in
+alphabetical order, with their present Latin, or tentative Latin, names;
+and in plain English, the senses intended by the hapless scientific people,
+in such their tentative Latin:--
+
+(1)   Viola Arvensis.   Field (Violet)                  No. 1748
+
+(2)     "   Biflora.    Two-flowered                    46
+
+(3)     "   Canina.     Dog                             1453
+
+(3b)    "   Canina.     Var. Multicaulus                2646
+                        (many-stemmed), a very
+                        singular sort of violet--if it
+                        were so! Its real difference
+                        from our dog-violet is in
+                        being pale blue, and having a
+                        golden centre
+
+(4)     "   Hirta.      Hairy                           618
+
+(5)     "   Mirabilis.  Marvellous                      1045
+
+(6)     "   Montana.    Mountain                        1329
+
+(7)     "   Odorata.    Odorous                         309
+
+(8)     "   Palustris.  Marshy                          83
+
+(9)     "   Tricolor.   Three-coloured                  623
+
+(9B)    "   Tricolor.   Var. Arenaria, Sandy            2647
+                        Three-coloured
+
+(10)    "   Elatior.    Taller                          68
+
+(11)    "   Epipsila.   (Heaven knows what: it is       2405
+                        Greek, not Latin, and looks as
+                        if it meant something between
+                        a bishop and a short letter e)
+
+I next run down this list, noting what names we can keep, and what we
+can't; and what aren't worth keeping, if we could: passing over the
+varieties, however, for the present, wholly.
+
+(1) Arvensis. Field-violet. Good.
+
+(2) Biflora. A good epithet, but in false Latin. It is to be our Viola
+aurea, golden pansy.
+
+(3) Canina. Dog. Not pretty, but intelligible, and by common use now
+classical. Must stay.
+
+(4) Hirta. Late Latin slang for hirsuta, and always used of nasty places or
+nasty people; it shall not stay. The species shall be our Viola
+Seclusa,--Monk's violet--meaning the kind of monk who leads a rough life
+like Elijah's, or the Baptist's, or Esau's--in another kind. This violet is
+one of the loveliest that grows.
+
+(5) Mirabilis. Stays so; marvellous enough, truly: not more so than all
+violets; but I am very glad to hear of scientific people capable of
+admiring anything.
+
+(6) Montana. Stays so.
+
+(7) Odorata. Not distinctive;--nearly classical, however. It is to be our
+Viola Regina, else I should not have altered it.
+
+(8) Palustris. Stays so.
+
+(9) Tricolor. True, but intolerable. The flower is the queen of the true
+pansies: to be our Viola Psyche.
+
+(10) Elatior. Only a variety of our already accepted Cornuta.
+
+(11) The last is, I believe, also only a variety of Palustris. Its leaves,
+I am informed in the text, are either "pubescent-reticulate-venose-
+subreniform," or "lato-cordate-repando-crenate;" and its stipules are
+"ovate-acuminate-fimbrio-denticulate." I do not wish to pursue the inquiry
+farther.
+
+24. These ten species will include, noting here and there a local variety,
+all the forms which are familiar to us in Northern Europe, except only
+two;--these, as it singularly chances, being the Viola Alpium, noblest of
+all the wild pansies in the world, so far as I have seen or heard of
+them,--of which, consequently, I find no picture, nor notice, in any
+botanical work whatsoever; and the other, the rock-violet of our own
+Yorkshire hills.
+
+We have therefore, ourselves, finally then, twelve following species to
+study. I give them now all in their accepted names and proper order,--the
+reasons for occasional difference between the Latin and English name will
+be presently given.
+
+(1)   Viola Regina.     Queen violet.
+
+(2)     "   Psyche.     Ophelia's pansy.
+
+(3)     "   Alpium.     Freneli's pansy.
+
+(4)     "   Aurea.      Golden violet.
+
+(5)     "   Montana.    Mountain Violet.
+
+(6)     "   Mirabilis.  Marvellous violet.
+
+(7)     "   Arvensis.   Field violet.
+
+(8)     "   Palustris.  Marsh violet.
+
+(9)     "   Seclusa.    Monk's violet.
+
+(10)    "   Canina.     Dog violet.
+
+(11)    "   Cornuta.    Cow violet.
+
+(12)    "   Rupestris.  Crag violet.
+
+25. We will try, presently, what is to be found out of useful, or pretty,
+concerning all these twelve violets; but must first find out how we are to
+know which are violets indeed, and which, pansies.
+
+Yesterday, after finishing my list, I went out again to examine Viola
+Cornuta a little closer, and pulled up a full grip of it by the roots, and
+put it in water in a wash-hand basin, which it filled like a truss of green
+hay.
+
+Pulling out two or three separate plants, I find each to consist mainly of
+a jointed stalk of a kind I have not yet described,--roughly, some two feet
+long altogether; (accurately, one 1 ft. 10½ in.; another, 1 ft. 10 in.;
+another, 1 ft. 9 in.--but all these measures taken without straightening,
+and therefore about an inch short of the truth), and divided into seven or
+eight lengths by clumsy joints where the mangled leafage is knotted on it;
+but broken a little out of the way at each joint, like a rheumatic elbow
+that won't come straight, or bend farther; and--which is the most curious
+point of all in it--it is thickest in the middle, like a viper, and gets
+quite thin to the root and thin towards the flower; also the lengths
+between the joints are longest in the middle: here I give them in inches,
+from the root upwards, in a stalk taken at random.
+
+1st (nearest root)   0¾
+
+2nd                  0¾
+
+3rd                  1½
+
+4th                  1¾
+
+5th                  3
+
+6th                  4
+
+7th                  3¼
+
+8th                  3
+
+9th                  2¼
+
+10th                 1½
+
+                     1 ft. 9¾ in.
+
+But the thickness of the joints and length of terminal flower stalk bring
+the total to two feet and about an inch over. I dare not pull it straight,
+or should break it, but it overlaps my two-foot rule considerably, and
+there are two inches besides of root, which are merely underground stem,
+very thin and wretched, as the rest of it is merely root above ground, very
+thick and bloated. (I begin actually to be a little awed at it, as I should
+be by a green snake--only the snake would be prettier.) The flowers also, I
+perceive, have not their two horns regularly set _in_, but the five spiky
+calyx-ends stick out between the petals--sometimes three, sometimes four,
+it may be all five up and down--and produce variously fanged or forked
+effects, feebly ophidian or diabolic. On the whole, a plant entirely
+mismanaging itself,--reprehensible and awkward, with taints of worse than
+awkwardness; and clearly, no true 'species,' but only a link.[2] And it
+really is, as you will find presently, a link in two directions; it is half
+violet, half pansy, a 'cur' among the Dogs, and a thoughtless thing among
+the thoughtful. And being so, it is also a link between the entire violet
+tribe and the Runners--pease, strawberries, and the like, whose glory is in
+their speed; but a violet has no business whatever to run anywhere, being
+appointed to stay where it was born, in extremely contented (if not
+secluded) places. "Half-hidden from the eye?"--no; but desiring attention,
+or extension, or corpulence, or connection with anybody else's family,
+still less.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. II.]
+
+26. And if, at the time you read this, you can run out and gather a _true_
+violet, and its leaf, you will find that the flower grows from the very
+ground, out of a cluster of heart-shaped leaves, becoming here a little
+rounder, there a little sharper, but on the whole heart-shaped, and that is
+the proper and essential form of the violet leaf. You will find also that
+the flower has five petals; and being held down by the bent stalk, two of
+them bend back and up, as if resisting it; two expand at the sides; and
+one, the principal, grows downwards, with its attached spur behind. So that
+the front view of the flower must be _some_ modification of this typical
+arrangement, Fig. M, (for middle form). Now the statement above quoted from
+Figuier, § 16, means, if he had been able to express himself, that the two
+lateral petals in the violet are directed downwards, Fig. II. A, and in the
+pansy upwards, Fig. II. C. And that, in the main, is true, and to be fixed
+well and clearly in your mind. But in the real orders, one flower passes
+into the other through all kinds of intermediate positions of petal, and
+the plurality of species are of the middle type. Fig. II. B.[3]
+
+27. Next, if you will gather a real pansy _leaf_, you will find it--not
+heart-shape in the least, but sharp oval or spear-shape, with two deep
+cloven lateral flakes at its springing from the stalk, which, in ordinary
+aspect, give the plant the haggled and draggled look I have been vilifying
+it for. These, and such as these, "leaflets at the base of other leaves"
+(Balfour's Glossary), are called by botanists 'stipules.' I have not
+allowed the word yet, and am doubtful of allowing it, because it entirely
+confuses the student's sense of the Latin 'stipula' (see above, vol. i.,
+chap. viii., § 27) doubly and trebly important in its connection with
+'stipulor,' not noticed in that paragraph, but readable in your large
+Johnson; we shall have more to say of it when we come to 'straw' itself.
+
+28. In the meantime, one _may_ think of these things as stipulations for
+leaves, not fulfilled, or 'stumps' or 'sumphs' of leaves! But I think I can
+do better for them. We have already got the idea of _crested_ leaves, (see
+vol. i., plate); now, on each side of a knight's crest, from earliest
+Etruscan times down to those of the Scalas, the fashion of armour held,
+among the nations who wished to make themselves terrible in aspect, of
+putting cut plates or 'bracts' of metal, like dragons' wings, on each side
+of the crest. I believe the custom never became Norman or English; it is
+essentially Greek, Etruscan, or Italian,--the Norman and Dane always
+wearing a practical cone (see the coins of Canute), and the Frank or
+English knights the severely plain beavered helmet; the Black Prince's at
+Canterbury, and Henry V.'s at Westminster, are kept hitherto by the great
+fates for us to see. But the Southern knights constantly wore these lateral
+dragon's wings; and if I can find their special name, it may perhaps be
+substituted with advantage for 'stipule'; but I have not wit enough by me
+just now to invent a term.
+
+29. Whatever we call them, the things themselves are, throughout all the
+species of violets, developed in the running and weedy varieties, and much
+subdued in the beautiful ones; and generally the pansies have them, large,
+with spear-shaped central leaves; and the violets small, with heart-shaped
+leaves, for more effective decoration of the ground. I now note the
+characters of each species in their above given order.
+
+30. I. VIOLA REGINA. Queen Violet. Sweet Violet. 'Viola Odorata,' L., Flora
+Danica, and Sowerby. The latter draws it with golden centre and white base
+of lower petal; the Flora Danica, all purple. It is sometimes altogether
+white. It is seen most perfectly for setting off its colour, in group with
+primrose,--and most luxuriantly, so far as I know, in hollows of the Savoy
+limestones, associated with the pervenche, which embroiders and illumines
+them all over. I believe it is the earliest of its race, sometimes called
+'Martia,' March violet. In Greece and South Italy even a flower of the
+winter.
+
+  "The Spring is come, the violet's _gone_,
+  The first-born child of the early sun.
+  With us, she is but a winter's flower;
+  The snow on the hills cannot blast her bower,
+  And she lifts up her dewy eye of blue
+  To the youngest sky of the selfsame hue.
+
+  And when the Spring comes, with her host
+  Of flowers, that flower beloved the most
+  Shrinks from the crowd that may confuse
+  Her heavenly odour, and virgin hues.
+
+  Pluck the others, but still remember
+  Their herald out of dim December,--
+  _The morning star_ of all the flowers,
+  The pledge of daylight's lengthened hours,
+  Nor, midst the roses, e'er forget
+  The virgin, virgin violet."[4]
+
+3. It is the queen, not only of the violet tribe, but of all low-growing
+flowers, in sweetness of scent--variously applicable and serviceable in
+domestic economy:--the scent of the lily of the valley seems less capable
+of preservation or use.
+
+But, respecting these perpetual beneficences and benignities of the sacred,
+as opposed to the malignant, herbs, whose poisonous power is for the most
+part restrained in them, during their life, to their juices or dust, and
+not allowed sensibly to pollute the air, I should like the scholar to
+re-read pp. 251, 252 of vol. i., and then to consider with himself what a
+grotesquely warped and gnarled thing the modern scientific mind is, which
+fiercely busies itself in venomous chemistries that blast every leaf from
+the forests ten miles round; and yet cannot tell us, nor even think of
+telling us, nor does even one of its pupils think of asking it all the
+while, how a violet throws off her perfume!--far less, whether it might not
+be more wholesome to 'treat' the air which men are to breathe in masses, by
+administration of vale-lilies and violets, instead of charcoal and sulphur!
+
+The closing sentence of the first volume just now referred
+to--p.254--should also be re-read; it was the sum of a chapter I had in
+hand at that time on the Substances and Essences of Plants--which never got
+finished;--and in trying to put it into small space, it has become obscure:
+the terms "logically inexplicable" meaning that no words or process of
+comparison will define scents, nor do any traceable modes of sequence or
+relation connect them; each is an independent power, and gives a separate
+impression to the senses. Above all, there is no logic of pleasure, nor any
+assignable reason for the difference, between loathsome and delightful
+scent, which makes the fungus foul and the vervain sacred: but one
+practical conclusion I (who am in all final ways the most prosaic and
+practical of human creatures) do very solemnly beg my readers to meditate;
+namely, that although not recognized by actual offensiveness of scent,
+there is no space of neglected land which is not in some way modifying the
+atmosphere of _all the world_,--it may be, beneficently, as heath and
+pine,--it may be, malignantly, as Pontine marsh or Brazilian jungle; but,
+in one way or another, for good and evil constantly, by day and night, the
+various powers of life and death in the plants of the desert are poured
+into the air, as vials of continual angels: and that no words, no thoughts
+can measure, nor imagination follow, the possible change for good which
+energetic and tender care of the wild herbs of the field and trees of the
+wood might bring, in time, to the bodily pleasure and mental power of Man.
+
+32. II. VIOLA PSYCHE. Ophelia's Pansy.
+
+The wild heart's-ease of Europe; its proper colour an exquisitely clear
+purple in the upper petals, gradated into deep blue in the lower ones; the
+centre, gold. Not larger than a violet, but perfectly formed, and firmly
+set in all its petals. Able to live in the driest ground; beautiful in the
+coast sand-hills of Cumberland, following the wild geranium and burnet
+rose: and distinguished thus by its power of life, in waste and dry places,
+from the violet, which needs kindly earth and shelter.
+
+Quite one of the most lovely things that Heaven has made, and only degraded
+and distorted by any human interference; the swollen varieties of it
+produced by cultivation being all gross in outline and coarse in colour by
+comparison.
+
+It is badly drawn even in the 'Flora Danica,' No. 623, considered there
+apparently as a species escaped from gardens; the description of it being
+as follows:--
+
+"Viola tricolor hortensis repens, flore purpureo et coeruleo, C.B.P., 199."
+(I don't know what C.B.P. means.) "Passim, juxta villas."
+
+"Viola tricolor, caule triquetro diffuso, foliis oblongis incisis, stipulis
+pinnatifidis," Linn. Systema Naturæ, 185.
+
+33. "Near the country farms"--does the Danish botanist mean?--the more
+luxuriant weedy character probably acquired by it only in such
+neighbourhood; and, I suppose, various confusion and degeneration possible
+to it beyond other plants when once it leaves its wild home. It is given by
+Sibthorpe from the Trojan Olympus, with an exquisitely delicate leaf; the
+flower described as "triste et pallide violaceus," but coloured in his
+plate full purple; and as he does not say whether he went up Olympus to
+gather it himself, or only saw it brought down by the assistant whose
+lovely drawings are yet at Oxford, I take leave to doubt his epithets. That
+this should be the only Violet described in a 'Flora Græca' extending to
+ten folio volumes, is a fact in modern scientific history which I must
+leave the Professor of Botany and the Dean of Christ Church to explain.
+
+34. The English varieties seem often to be yellow in the lower petals, (see
+Sowerby's plate, 1287 of the old edition), crossed, I imagine, with Viola
+Aurea, (but see under Viola Rupestris, No. 12); the names, also, varying
+between tricolor and bicolor--with no note anywhere of the three colours,
+or two colours, intended!
+
+The old English names are many.--'Love in idleness,'--making Lysander, as
+Titania, much wandering in mind, and for a time mere 'Kits run the street'
+(or run the wood?)--"Call me to you" (Gerarde, ch. 299, Sowerby, No. 178),
+with 'Herb Trinity,' from its three colours, blue, purple, and gold,
+variously blended in different countries? 'Three faces under a hood'
+describes the English variety only. Said to be the ancestress of all the
+florists' pansies, but this I much doubt, the next following species being
+far nearer the forms most chiefly sought for.
+
+35. III. VIOLA ALPINA. 'Freneli's Pansy'--my own name for it, from
+Gotthelf's Freneli, in 'Ulric the Farmer'; the entirely pure and noble type
+of the Bernese maid, wife, and mother.
+
+The pansy of the Wengern Alp in specialty, and of the higher, but still
+rich, Alpine pastures. Full dark-purple; at least an inch across the
+expanded petals; I believe, the 'Mater Violarum' of Gerarde; and true black
+violet of Virgil, remaining in Italian 'Viola Mammola' (Gerarde, ch. 298).
+
+36. IV. VIOLA AUREA. Golden Violet. Biflora usually; but its brilliant
+yellow is a much more definite characteristic; and needs insisting on,
+because there is a 'Viola lutea' which is not yellow at all; named so by
+the garden florists. My Viola aurea is the Rock-violet of the Alps; one of
+the bravest, brightest, and dearest of little flowers. The following notes
+upon it, with its summer companions, a little corrected from my diary of
+1877, will enough characterize it.
+
+"_June 7th._--The cultivated meadows now grow only dandelions--in frightful
+quantity too; but, for wild ones, primula, bell gentian, golden pansy, and
+anemone,--Primula farinosa in mass, the pansy pointing and vivifying in a
+petulant sweet way, and the bell gentian here and there deepening all,--as
+if indeed the sound of a deep bell among lighter music.
+
+"Counted in order, I find the effectively constant flowers are eight;[5]
+namely,
+
+"1. The golden anemone, with richly cut large leaf; primrose colour, and in
+masses like primrose, studded through them with bell gentian, and dark
+purple orchis.
+
+"2. The dark purple orchis, with bell gentian in equal quantity, say six of
+each in square yard, broken by sparklings of the white orchis and the white
+grass-flower; the richest piece of colour I ever saw, touched with gold by
+the geum.
+
+"3 and 4. These will be white orchis and the grass flower.[6]
+
+"5. Geum--everywhere, in deep, but pure, gold, like pieces of Greek mosaic.
+
+"6. Soldanella, in the lower meadows, delicate, but not here in masses.
+
+"7. Primula Alpina, divine in the rock clefts, and on the ledges changing
+the grey to purple,--set in the dripping caves with
+
+"8. Viola (pertinax--pert); I want a Latin word for various
+studies--failures all--to express its saucy little stuck-up way, and
+exquisitely trim peltate leaf. I never saw such a lovely perspective line
+as the pure front leaf profile. Impossible also to get the least of the
+spirit of its lovely dark brown fibre markings. Intensely golden these dark
+fibres, just browning the petal a little between them."
+
+And again in the defile of Gondo, I find "Viola (saxatilis?) name yet
+wanted;--in the most delicate studding of its round leaves, like a small
+fern more than violet, and bright sparkle of small flowers in the dark
+dripping hollows. Assuredly delights in shade and distilling moisture of
+rocks."
+
+I found afterwards a much larger yellow pansy on the Yorkshire high
+limestones; with vigorously black crowfoot marking on the lateral petals.
+
+37. V. VIOLA MONTANA. Mountain Violet.
+
+Flora Danica, 1329. Linnæus, No. 13, "Caulibus erectis, foliis
+cordato-lanceolatis, floribus serioribus apetalis," _i.e._, on erect stems,
+with leaves long heart-shape, and its later flowers without petals--not a
+word said of its earlier flowers which have got those unimportant
+appendages! In the plate of the Flora it is a very perfect transitional
+form between violet and pansy, with beautifully firm and well-curved
+leaves, but the colour of blossom very pale. "In subalpinis Norvegiæ
+passim," all that we are told of it, means I suppose, in the lower Alpine
+pastures of Norway; in the Flora Suecica, p. 306, habitat in Lapponica,
+juxta Alpes.
+
+38. VI. VIOLA MIRABILIS. Flora Danica, 1045. A small and exquisitely formed
+flower in the balanced cinquefoil intermediate between violet and pansy,
+but with large and superbly curved and pointed leaves. It is a mountain
+violet, but belonging rather to the mountain woods than meadows. "In
+sylvaticis in Toten, Norvegiæ."
+
+Loudon, 3056, "Broad-leaved: Germany."
+
+Linnæus, Flora Suecica, 789, says that the flowers of it which have perfect
+corolla and full scent often bear no seed, but that the later 'cauline'
+blossoms, without petals, are fertile. "Caulini vero apetali fertiles sunt,
+et seriores. Habitat passim Upsaliæ."
+
+I find this, and a plurality of other species, indicated by Linnæus as
+having triangular stalks, "caule triquetro," meaning, I suppose, the kind
+sketched in Figure 1 above.
+
+39. VII. VIOLA ARVENSIS. Field Violet. Flora Danica, 1748. A coarse running
+weed; nearly like Viola Cornuta, but feebly lilac and yellow in colour. In
+dry fields, and with corn.
+
+Flora Suecica, 791; under titles of Viola 'tricolor' and 'bicolor
+arvensis,' and Herba Trinitatis. Habitat ubique in _sterilibus_ arvis:
+"Planta vix datur in qua evidentius perspicitur generationis opus, quam in
+hujus cavo apertoque stigmate."
+
+It is quite undeterminable, among present botanical instructors, how far
+this plant is only a rampant and over-indulged condition of the true pansy
+(Viola Psyche); but my own scholars are to remember that the true pansy is
+full purple and blue with golden centre; and that the disorderly field
+varieties of it, if indeed not scientifically distinguishable, are entirely
+separate from the wild flower by their scattered form and faded or altered
+colour. I follow the Flora Danica in giving them as a distinct species.
+
+40. VIII. VIOLA PALUSTRIS. Marsh Violet. Flora Danica, 83. As there drawn,
+the most finished and delicate in form of all the violet tribe; warm white,
+streaked with red; and as pure in outline as an oxalis, both in flower and
+leaf: it is like a violet imitating oxalis and anagallis.
+
+In the Flora Suecica, the petal-markings are said to be black; in 'Viola
+lactea' a connected species, (Sowerby, 45,) purple. Sowerby's plate of it
+under the name 'palustris' is pale purple veined with darker; and the spur
+is said to be 'honey-bearing,' which is the first mention I find of honey
+in the violet. The habitat given, sandy and turfy heaths. It is said to
+grow plentifully near Croydon.
+
+Probably, therefore, a violet belonging to the chalk, on which nearly all
+herbs that grow wild--from the grass to the bluebell--are singularly sweet
+and pure. I hope some of my botanical scholars will take up this question
+of the effect of different rocks on vegetation, not so much in bearing
+different species of plants, as different characters of each species.[7]
+
+41. IX. VIOLA SECLUSA. Monk's Violet. "Hirta," Flora Danica, 618, "In
+fruticetis raro." A true wood violet, full but dim in purple. Sowerby, 894,
+makes it paler. The leaves very pure and severe in the Danish one;--longer
+in the English. "Clothed on both sides with short, dense, hoary hairs."
+
+Also belongs to chalk or limestone only (Sowerby).
+
+X. VIOLA CANINA. Dog Violet. I have taken it for analysis in my two plates,
+because its grace of form is too much despised, and we owe much more of the
+beauty of spring to it, in English mountain ground, than to the Regina.
+
+XI. VIOLA CORNUTA. Cow Violet. Enough described already.
+
+XII. VIOLA RUPESTRIS. Crag Violet. On the high limestone moors of
+Yorkshire, perhaps only an English form of Viola Aurea, but so much larger,
+and so different in habit--growing on dry breezy downs, instead of in
+dripping caves--that I allow it, for the present, separate name and
+number.[8]
+
+42. 'For the present,' I say all this work in 'Proserpina' being merely
+tentative, much to be modified by future students, and therefore quite
+different from that of 'Deucalion,' which is authoritative as far as it
+reaches, and will stand out like a quartz dyke, as the sandy speculations
+of modern gossiping geologists get washed away.
+
+But in the meantime, I must again solemnly warn my girl-readers against all
+study of floral genesis and digestion. How far flowers invite, or require,
+flies to interfere in their family affairs--which of them are
+carnivorous--and what forms of pestilence or infection are most favourable
+to some vegetable and animal growths,--let them leave the people to settle
+who like, as Toinette says of the Doctor in the 'Malade Imaginaire'--"y
+mettre le nez." I observe a paper in the last 'Contemporary Review,'
+announcing for a discovery patent to all mankind that the colours of
+flowers were made "to attract insects"![9] They will next hear that the
+rose was made for the canker, and the body of man for the worm.
+
+43. What the colours of flowers, or of birds, or of precious stones, or of
+the sea and air, and the blue mountains, and the evening and the morning,
+and the clouds of Heaven, were given for--they only know who can see them
+and can feel, and who pray that the sight and the love of them may be
+prolonged, where cheeks will not fade, nor sunsets die.
+
+44. And now, to close, let me give you some fuller account of the reasons
+for the naming of the order to which the violet belongs, 'Cytherides.'
+
+You see that the Uranides, are, as far as I could so gather them, of the
+pure blue of the sky; but the Cytherides of altered blue;--the first,
+Viola, typically purple; the second, Veronica, pale blue with a peculiar
+light; the third, Giulietta, deep blue, passing strangely into a subdued
+green before and after the full life of the flower.
+
+All these three flowers have great strangenesses in them, and weaknesses;
+the Veronica most wonderful in its connection with the poisonous tribe of
+the foxgloves; the Giulietta, alone among flowers in the action of the
+shielding leaves; and the Viola, grotesque and inexplicable in its hidden
+structure, but the most sacred of all flowers to earthly and daily Love,
+both in its scent and glow.
+
+Now, therefore, let us look completely for the meaning of the two leading
+lines,--
+
+  "Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
+  Or Cytherea's breath."
+
+45. Since, in my present writings, I hope to bring into one focus the
+pieces of study fragmentarily given during past life, I may refer my
+readers to the first chapter of the 'Queen of the Air' for the explanation
+of the way in which all great myths are founded, partly on physical, partly
+on moral fact,--so that it is not possible for persons who neither know the
+aspect of nature, nor the constitution of the human soul, to understand a
+word of them. Naming the Greek gods, therefore, you have first to think of
+the physical power they represent. When Horace calls Vulcan 'Avidus,' he
+thinks of him as the power of Fire; when he speaks of Jupiter's red right
+hand, he thinks of him as the power of rain with lightning; and when Homer
+speaks of Juno's dark eyes, you have to remember that she is the softer
+form of the rain power, and to think of the fringes of the rain-cloud
+across the light of the horizon. Gradually the idea becomes personal and
+human in the "Dove's eyes within thy locks,"[10] and "Dove's eyes by the
+river of waters" of the Song of Solomon.
+
+46. "Or Cytherea's breath,"--the two thoughts of softest glance, and
+softest kiss, being thus together associated with the flower: but note
+especially that the Island of Cythera was dedicated to Venus because it was
+the chief, if not the only Greek island, in which the purple fishery of
+Tyre was established; and in our own minds should be marked not only as the
+most southern fragment of true Greece, but the virtual continuation of the
+chain of mountains which separate the Spartan from the Argive territories,
+and are the natural home of the brightest Spartan and Argive beauty which
+is symbolized in Helen.
+
+47. And, lastly, in accepting for the order this name of Cytherides, you
+are to remember the names of Viola and Giulietta, its two limiting
+families, as those of Shakspeare's two most loving maids--the two who love
+simply, and to the death: as distinguished from the greater natures in whom
+earthly Love has its due part, and no more; and farther still from the
+greatest, in whom the earthly love is quiescent, or subdued, beneath the
+thoughts of duty and immortality.
+
+It may be well quickly to mark for you the levels of loving temper in
+Shakspeare's maids and wives, from the greatest to the least.
+
+48. 1. Isabel. All earthly love, and the possibilities of it, held in
+absolute subjection to the laws of God, and the judgments of His will. She
+is Shakspeare's only 'Saint.' Queen Catherine, whom you might next think
+of, is only an ordinary woman of trained religious temper:--her maid of
+honour gives Wolsey a more Christian epitaph.
+
+2. Cordelia. The earthly love consisting in diffused compassion of the
+universal spirit; not in any conquering, personally fixed, feeling.
+
+                  "Mine enemy's dog,
+  Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
+  Against my fire."
+
+These lines are spoken in her hour of openest direct expression; and are
+_all_ Cordelia.
+
+Shakspeare clearly does not mean her to have been supremely beautiful in
+person; it is only her true lover who calls her 'fair' and 'fairest'--and
+even that, I believe, partly in courtesy, after having the instant before
+offered her to his subordinate duke; and it is only _his_ scorn of her
+which makes France fully care for her.
+
+  "Gods, Gods, 'tis strange that from their cold neglect
+  My love should kindle to inflamed respect!"
+
+Had she been entirely beautiful, he would have honoured her as a lover
+should, even before he saw her despised; nor would she ever have been so
+despised--or by her father, misunderstood. Shakspeare himself does not
+pretend to know where her girl-heart was,--but I should like to hear how a
+great actress would say the "Peace be with Burgundy!"
+
+3. Portia. The maidenly passion now becoming great, and chiefly divine in
+its humility, is still held absolutely subordinate to duty; no thought of
+disobedience to her dead father's intention is entertained for an instant,
+though the temptation is marked as passing, for that instant, before her
+crystal strength. Instantly, in her own peace, she thinks chiefly of her
+lover's;--she is a perfect Christian wife in a moment, coming to her
+husband with the gift of perfect Peace,--
+
+  "Never shall you lie by Portia's side
+  With an unquiet soul."
+
+She is highest in intellect of all Shakspeare's women, and this is the root
+of her modesty; her 'unlettered girl' is like Newton's simile of the child
+on the sea-shore. Her perfect wit and stern judgment are never disturbed
+for an instant by her happiness: and the final key to her character is
+given in her silent and slow return from Venice, where she stops at every
+wayside shrine to pray.
+
+4. Hermione. Fortitude and Justice personified, with unwearying affection.
+She is Penelope, tried by her husband's fault as well as error.
+
+5. Virgilia. Perfect type of wife and mother, but without definiteness of
+character, nor quite strength of intellect enough entirely to hold her
+husband's heart. Else, she had saved him: he would have left Rome in his
+wrath--but not her. Therefore, it is his mother only who bends him: but she
+cannot save.
+
+6. Imogen. The ideal of grace and gentleness; but weak; enduring too
+mildly, and forgiving too easily. But the piece is rather a pantomime than
+play, and it is impossible to judge of the feelings of St. Columba, when
+she must leave the stage in half a minute after mistaking the headless
+clown for headless Arlecchino.
+
+7. Desdemona, Ophelia, Rosalind. They are under different conditions from
+all the rest, in having entirely heroic and faultless persons to love. I
+can't class them, therefore,--fate is too strong, and leaves them no free
+will.
+
+8. Perdita, Miranda. Rather mythic visions of maiden beauty than mere
+girls.
+
+9. Viola and Juliet. Love the ruling power in the entire character: wholly
+virginal and pure, but quite earthly, and recognizing no other life than
+his own. Viola is, however, far the noblest. Juliet will die unless Romeo
+loves _her_: "If he be wed, the grave is like to be my wedding bed;" but
+Viola is ready to die for the happiness of the man who does _not_ love her;
+faithfully doing his messages to her rival, whom she examines strictly for
+his sake. It is not in envy that she says, "Excellently done,--if God did
+all." The key to her character is given in the least selfish of all lover's
+songs, the one to which the Duke bids her listen:
+
+  "Mark it, Cesario,--it is old and plain,
+  The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
+  And the free maids, that _weave their thread with bones_,
+  Do use to chaunt it."
+
+(They, the unconscious Fates, weaving the fair vanity of life with death);
+and the burden of it is--
+
+  "My part of Death, no one so true
+  Did share it."
+
+Therefore she says, in the great first scene, "Was not _this_ love indeed?"
+and in the less heeded closing one, her heart then happy with the knitters
+in the _sun_,
+
+  "And all those sayings will I over-swear,
+  And all those swearings keep as true in soul
+  As doth that orbed continent the Fire
+  That severs day from night."
+
+Or, at least, did once sever day from night,--and perhaps does still in
+Illyria. Old England must seek new images for her loves from gas and
+electric sparks,--not to say furnace fire.
+
+I am obliged, by press of other work, to set down these notes in cruel
+shortness: and many a reader may be disposed to question utterly the
+standard by which the measurement is made. It will not be found, on
+reference to my other books, that they encourage young ladies to go into
+convents; or undervalue the dignity of wives and mothers. But, as surely as
+the sun _does_ sever day from night, it will be found always that the
+noblest and loveliest women are dutiful and religious by continual nature;
+and their passions are trained to obey them; like their dogs. Homer,
+indeed, loves Helen with all his heart, and restores her, after all her
+naughtiness, to the queenship of her household; but he never thinks of her
+as Penelope's equal, or Iphigenia's. Practically, in daily life, one often
+sees married women as good as saints; but rarely, I think, unless they have
+a good deal to bear from their husbands. Sometimes also, no doubt, the
+husbands have some trouble in managing St. Cecilia or St. Elizabeth; of
+which questions I shall be obliged to speak more seriously in another
+place: content, at present, if English maids know better, by Proserpina's
+help, what Shakspeare meant by the dim, and Milton by the glowing, violet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+PINGUICULA.
+
+(Written in early June, 1881.)
+
+1. On the rocks of my little stream, where it runs, or leaps, through the
+moorland, the common Pinguicula is now in its perfectest beauty; and it is
+one of the offshoots of the violet tribe which I have to place in the minor
+collateral groups of Viola very soon, and must not put off looking at it
+till next year.
+
+There are three varieties given in Sowerby: 1. Vulgaris, 2.
+Greater-flowered, and 3. Lusitanica, white, for the most part, pink, or
+'carnea,' sometimes: but the proper colour of the family is violet, and the
+perfect form of the plant is the 'vulgar' one. The larger-flowered variety
+is feebler in colour, and ruder in form: the white Spanish one, however, is
+very lovely, as far as I can judge from Sowerby's (_old_ Sowerby's) pretty
+drawing.
+
+The 'frequent' one (I shall usually thus translate 'vulgaris'), is not by
+any means so 'frequent' as the Queen violet, being a true wild-country, and
+mostly Alpine, plant; and there is also a real 'Pinguicula Alpina,' which
+we have not in England, who might be the Regina, if the group were large
+enough to be reigned over: but it is better not to affect Royalty among
+these confused, intermediate, or dependent families.
+
+2. In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has one stalk only,
+growing from the _ground_ and you may pull all the leaves away from the
+base of it, and keep the flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous
+roots, half an inch long; looking as if bitten at the ends. Two flowers,
+characteristically,--three and four very often,--spring from the same root,
+in places where it grows luxuriantly; and luxuriant growth means that
+clusters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on the surface of a
+square yard of boggy ground, quite to its mind; but its real glory is in
+harder life, in the crannies of well-wetted rock.
+
+3. What I have called 'stars' are irregular clusters of approximately, or
+tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, of very pale green,--they may be
+six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement,
+essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. Taken as a whole the
+_plant_ is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the
+_flower_ has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,--spurred, and
+_five-petaled_,[11] and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a
+violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted--the calyx, of a dark
+soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly
+like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are
+often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five. Tearing
+away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might
+hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being
+really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell,
+seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now
+also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and
+well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal
+near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx,
+spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly
+like an irregular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly like the
+wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.[12]
+
+4. The calyx is of a dark _soppy_ green, I said; like that of sugary
+preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and
+yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it
+were, water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long in water.
+And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a
+bog, and obliged to live there--not for its own sins, but for some Emperor
+Pansy's, far away in the garden,--in a partly boggish, partly hoggish
+manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got
+into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;--something
+of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable
+sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be
+truer of it than a piggish, the _nest_ of it being indeed on the rock, or
+morassy rock-investiture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge.
+
+5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon's
+Encyclopædia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley ('Ladies'
+Botany'), and Figuer, without being able to find the meaning of
+'Lentibulariaceæ,' to which tribe the Pinguicula is said by them all
+(except Figuier) to belong. It may perhaps be in Sowerby:[13] but these
+above-named treatises are precisely of the kind with which the ordinary
+scholar must be content: and in all of them he has to learn this long,
+worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed into classing together
+two orders naturally quite distinct, the Butterworts and the Bladderworts.
+
+Whatever the name may mean--it is bad Latin. There is such a word as
+Lenticularis--there is no Lentibularis; and it must positively trouble us
+no longer.[14]
+
+The Butterworts are a perfectly distinct group--whether small or large,
+always recognizable at a glance. Their proper Latin name will be
+Pinguicula, (plural Pinguiculæ,)--their English, Bog-Violet, or, more
+familiarly, Butterwort; and their French, as at present, _Grassette_.
+
+The families to be remembered will be only five, namely,
+
+1. Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group. As bog plants, Ireland may
+rightly claim the noblest of them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly,
+and not (I believe) with us. Their colour is, however, more broken and less
+characteristic than that of the following species.
+
+2. Pinguicula Violacea: Violet-coloured Butterwort, (instead of
+'vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.
+
+3. Pinguicula Alpina: Alpine Butterwort, white and much smaller than either
+of the first two families; the spur especially small, according to D. 453.
+Much rarer, as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern
+Europe. "In Britain, known only upon the moors of Rosehaugh, Ross-shire,
+where the progress of cultivation seems likely soon to efface it."
+(Grindon.)
+
+4. Pinguicula Pallida: Pale Butterwort. From Sowerby's drawing, (135, vol.
+iii,) it would appear to be the most delicate and lovely of all the group.
+The leaves, "like those of other species, but rather more delicate and
+pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much involute in the margin. Tube
+of the corolla, yellow, streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a
+pansy); the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima,
+No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part
+the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a
+slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end."
+(Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead,
+the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)
+
+The pale one is commonly called 'Lusitanica,' but I find no direct notice
+of its Portuguese habitation. Sowerby's plant came from Blandford,
+Dorsetshire; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran,
+and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape
+Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is
+found.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. III.]
+
+5. Pinguicula Minima: Least Butterwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the
+_scape_ of it being hairy. I have not yet got rid of this absurd word
+'scape,' meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing
+out of a cluster of leaves on the ground. It is a bad corruption of
+'sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is
+necessarily branched.[15] In 'Proserpina,' when it is spoken of
+distinctively, it is called 'virgula' (see vol. i., pp. 146, 147, 151,
+152). The hairs on the virgula are in this instance so minute, that even
+with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish plate: of which Fig. 3 is a
+rough translation into woodcut, to show the grace and mien of the little
+thing. The trine leaf cluster is characteristic, and the folding up of the
+leaf edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. Abundant in east
+of _Finmark_ (Finland?), but _always growing in marsh moss_, (Sphagnum
+palustre).
+
+6. I call it 'Minima' only, as the least of the five here named; without
+putting forward any claim for it to be the smallest pinguicula that ever
+was or will be. In such sense only, the epithets minima or maxima are to be
+understood when used in 'Proserpina': and so also, every statement and
+every principle is only to be understood as true or tenable, respecting the
+plants which the writer has seen, and which he is sure that the reader can
+easily see: liable to modification to any extent by wider experience; but
+better first learned securely within a narrow fence, and afterwards trained
+or fructified, along more complex trellises.
+
+7. And indeed my readers--at least, my newly found readers--must note
+always that the only power which I claim for any of my books, is that of
+being right and true as far as they reach. None of them pretend to be
+Kosmoses;--none to be systems of Positivism or Negativism, on which the
+earth is in future to swing instead of on its old worn-out poles;--none of
+them to be works of genius;--none of them to be, more than all true work
+_must_ be, pious;--and none to be, beyond the power of common people's
+eyes,[16] ears, and noses, 'æsthetic.' They tell you that the world is _so_
+big, and can't be made bigger--that you yourself are also so big, and can't
+be made bigger, however you puff or bloat yourself; but that, on modern
+mental nourishment, you may very easily be made smaller. They tell you that
+two and two are four, that ginger is hot in the mouth, that roses are red,
+and smuts black. Not themselves assuming to be pious, they yet assure you
+that there is such a thing as piety in the world, and that it is wiser than
+impiety; and not themselves pretending to be works of genius, they yet
+assure you that there is such a thing as genius in the world, and that it
+is meant for the light and delight of the world.
+
+8. Into these repetitions of remarks on my work, often made before, I have
+been led by an unlucky author who has just sent me his book, advising me
+that it is "neither critical nor sentimental" (he had better have said in
+plain English "without either judgment or feeling"), and in which nearly
+the first sentence I read is--"Solomon with all his acuteness was not wise
+enough to ... etc., etc., etc." ('give the Jews the British constitution,'
+I believe the man means.) He is not a whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert
+Spencer, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall,--or any lively London
+apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect
+to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern
+Cockney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for
+us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have
+been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we grew
+older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, and
+struck harder.
+
+9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to
+the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but,
+of late, even _every word I use_, being alike inconceivable to the
+insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London
+writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr.
+Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist--as far as it had any--was
+that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I
+found the word 'tribal' repeated about ten times in every page. Now, if
+'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal;
+and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal
+conversation! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to
+blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not
+separate races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman Tribes,
+political divisions; essentially Trine: and the whole force of the word
+Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy
+innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of
+mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral';
+the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on
+distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.
+
+10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in
+this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs,
+I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;--but this finally I
+repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English,
+of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little
+finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are
+comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and
+_accurate_, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science
+cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.
+
+11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my
+extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the
+Butterwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered,
+_do_ need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their
+companionship. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among
+them; but masses them under the general type of the frequent English one,
+described as the second kind of his promiscuous group of 'Sanicle,' "which
+Clusius calleth Pinguicula; not before his time remembered, hath sundry
+small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards the root and
+sharp towards the point, of a faint green colour, and bitter in taste; out
+of the middest whereof sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine
+inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes white,
+and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fashioned like unto the common
+Monkshoods" (he means Larkspurs) "called Consolida Regalis, having the like
+spur or Lark's heel attached thereto." Then after describing a third kind
+of Sanicle--(Cortusa Mathioli, a large-leaved Alpine Primula,) he goes on:
+"These plants are strangers in England; their natural country is the alpish
+mountains of Helvetia. They grow in my garden, where they flourish
+exceedingly, except Butterwoort, which groweth in our English _squally_ wet
+grounds,"--('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does
+not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it
+nearly: "Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much
+corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"--and note farther that the
+word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but the Arabic
+'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:--the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning
+a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squæla' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely
+have been made an adjective by Gerarde),--"and will not yield to any
+culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge
+Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, in Westmerland; (West-_mere_-land you
+observe, not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, twelve miles from Lancaster, and
+by Harwoode in the same county near to Blackburn: ten miles from Preston,
+in Anderness, upon the bogs and marish ground, and in the boggie meadows
+about Bishop's-Hatfield, and also in the fens in the way to Wittles Meare"
+(Roger Wildrake's Squattlesea Mere?) "from Fendon, in Huntingdonshire."
+Where doubtless Cromwell ploughed it up, in his young days, pitilessly; and
+in nowise pausing, as Burns beside his fallen daisy.
+
+12. Finally, however, I believe we may accept its English name of
+'Butterwort' as true Yorkshire, the more enigmatic form of 'Pigwilly'
+preserving the tradition of the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin
+name, in Pigwilly bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. Gerarde draws
+the English variety as "Pinguicula sive Sanicula Eboracensis,--Butterwoort,
+or Yorkshire Sanicle;" and he adds: "The husbandmen's wives of Yorkshire do
+use to anoint the dugs of their kine with the fat and oilous juice of the
+herb Butterwort when they be bitten of any venomous worm, or chapped,
+rifted and hurt by any other means."
+
+13. In Lapland it is put to much more certain use; "it is called Tätgrass,
+and the leaves are used by the inhabitants to make their 'tät miolk,' a
+preparation of milk in common use among them. Some fresh leaves are laid
+upon a filter, and milk, yet warm from the reindeer, is poured over them.
+After passing quickly through the filter, this is allowed to rest for one
+or two days until it becomes ascescent,[17] when it is found not to have
+separated from the whey, and yet to have attained much greater tenacity and
+consistence than it would have done otherwise. The Laplanders and Swedes
+are said to be extremely fond of this milk, which when once made, it is not
+necessary to renew the use of the leaves, for we are told that a spoonful
+of it will turn another quantity of warm milk, and make it like the
+first."[18] (Baxter, vol. iii., No. 209.)
+
+14. In the same page, I find quoted Dr. Johnston's observation that "when
+specimens of this plant were somewhat rudely pulled up, the flower-stalk,
+previously erect, almost immediately began to bend itself backwards, and
+formed a more or less perfect segment of a circle; and so also, if a
+specimen is placed in the Botanic box, you will in a short time find that
+the leaves have curled themselves backwards, and now conceal the root by
+their revolution."
+
+I have no doubt that this elastic and wiry action is partly connected with
+the plant's more or less predatory or fly-trap character, in which these
+curiously degraded plants are associated with Drosera. I separate them
+therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them to be a link
+between the Violets and the Droseraceæ, placing them, however, with the
+Cytherides, as a sub-family, for their beautiful colour, and because they
+are indeed a grace and delight in ground which, but for them, would be
+painfully and rudely desolate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+VERONICA.
+
+1. "The Corolla of the Foxglove," says Dr. Lindley, beginning his account
+of the tribe at page 195 of the first volume of his 'Ladies' Botany,' "is a
+large inflated body(!), with its throat spotted with rich purple, and its
+border divided obliquely into five very short lobes, of which the two upper
+are the smaller; its four stamens are of unequal length, and its style is
+divided into two lobes at the upper end. A number of long hairs cover the
+ovary, which contains two cells and a great quantity of ovules.
+
+"This" (_sc._ information) "will show you what is the usual character of
+the Foxglove tribe; and you will find that all the other genera referred to
+it in books agree with it essentially, although they differ in subordinate
+points. It is chiefly (A) in the form of the corolla, (B) in the number of
+the stamens, (C) in the consistence of the rind of the fruit, (D) in its
+form, (E) in the number of the seeds it contains, and (F) in the manner in
+which the sepals are combined, that these differences consist."
+
+2. The enumerative letters are of my insertion--otherwise the above
+sentence is, word for word, Dr. Lindley's,--and it seems to me an
+interesting and memorable one in the history of modern Botanical science.
+For it appears from the tenor of it, that in a scientific botanist's mind,
+six particulars, at least, in the character of a plant, are merely
+'subordinate points,'--namely,
+
+  1. (F) The combination of its calyx,
+  2. (A) The shape of its corolla,
+  3. (B) The number of its stamens,
+  4. (D) The form of its fruit,
+  5. (C) The consistence of its shell,--and
+  6. (E) The number of seeds in it.
+
+Abstracting, then, from the primary description, all the six inessential
+points, I find the three essential ones left are, that the style is divided
+into two lobes at the upper end, that a number of glandular hairs cover the
+ovary, and that this latter contains two cells.
+
+3. None of which particulars concern any reasonable mortal, looking at a
+Foxglove, in the smallest degree. Whether hairs which he can't see are
+glandular or bristly,--whether the green knobs, which are left when the
+purple bells are gone, are divided into two lobes or two hundred,--and
+whether the style is split, like a snake's tongue, into two lobes, or like
+a rogue's, into any number--are merely matters of vulgar curiosity, which
+he needs a microscope to discover, and will lose a day of his life in
+discovering. But if any pretty young Proserpina, escaped from the Plutonic
+durance of London, and carried by the tubular process, which replaces
+Charon's boat, over the Lune at Lancaster, cares to come and walk on the
+Coniston hills in a summer morning, when the eyebright is out on the high
+fields, she may gather, with a little help from Brantwood garden, a bouquet
+of the entire Foxglove tribe in flower, as it is at present defined, and
+may see what they are like, altogether.
+
+4. She shall gather: first, the Euphrasy, which makes the turf on the brow
+of the hill glitter as if with new-fallen manna; then, from one of the blue
+clusters on the top of the garden wall, the common bright blue Speedwell;
+and, from the garden bed beneath, a dark blue spire of Veronica spicata;
+then, at the nearest opening into the wood, a little foxglove in its first
+delight of shaking out its bells; then--what next does the Doctor say?--a
+snapdragon? we must go back into the garden for that--here is a goodly
+crimson one, but what the little speedwell will think of him for a relative
+_I_ can't think!--a mullein?--that we must do without for the moment; a
+monkey flower?--that we will do without, altogether; a lady's slipper?--say
+rather a goblin's with the gout! but, such as the flower-cobbler has made
+it, here is one of the kind that people praise, out of the greenhouse,--and
+yet a figwort we must have, too; which I see on referring to Loudon, may be
+balm-leaved, hemp-leaved, tansy-leaved, nettle-leaved, wing-leaved,
+heart-leaved, ear-leaved, spear-leaved, or lyre-leaved. I think I can find
+a balm-leaved one, though I don't know what to make of it when I've got it,
+but it's called a 'Scorodonia' in Sowerby, and something very ugly
+besides;--I'll put a bit of Teucrium Scorodonia in, to finish: and now--how
+will my young Proserpina arrange her bouquet, and rank the family relations
+to their contentment?
+
+5. She has only one kind of flowers--in her hand, as botanical
+classification stands at present; and whether the system be more rational,
+or in any human sense more scientific, which puts calceolaria and speedwell
+together,--and foxglove and euphrasy; and runs them on one side into the
+mints, and on the other into the nightshades;--naming them, meanwhile, some
+from diseases, some from vermin, some from blockheads, and the rest
+anyhow:--or the method I am pleading for, which teaches us, watchful of
+their seasonable return and chosen abiding places, to associate in our
+memory the flowers which truly resemble, or fondly companion, or, in time
+kept by the signs of Heaven, succeed, each other; and to name them in some
+historical connection with the loveliest fancies and most helpful faiths of
+the ancestral world--Proserpina be judge; with every maid that sets flowers
+on brow or breast--from Thule to Sicily.
+
+6. We will unbind our bouquet, then, and putting all the rest of its
+flowers aside, examine the range and nature of the little blue cluster
+only.
+
+And first--we have to note of it, that the plan of the blossom in all the
+kinds is the same; an irregular quatre-foil: and irregular quatrefoils are
+of extreme rarity in flower form. I don't myself know _one_, except the
+Veronica. The cruciform vegetables--the heaths, the olives, the lilacs, the
+little Tormentillas, and the poppies, are all perfectly symmetrical. Two of
+the petals, indeed, as a rule, are different from the other two, except in
+the heaths; and thus a distinctly crosslet form obtained, but always an
+equally balanced one: while in the Veronica, as in the Violet, the blossom
+always refers itself to a supposed place on the stalk with respect to the
+ground; and the upper petal is always the largest.
+
+The supposed place is often very suppositious indeed--for clusters of the
+common veronicas, if luxuriant, throw their blossoms about anywhere. But
+the idea of an upper and lower petal is always kept in the flower's little
+mind.
+
+7. In the second place, it is a quite open and flat quatrefoil--so
+separating itself from the belled quadrature of the heath, and the tubed
+and primrose-like quadrature of the cruciferæ; and, both as a quatrefoil,
+and as an open one, it is separated from the foxgloves and snapdragons,
+which are neither quatrefoils, nor open; but are cinqfoils shut up!
+
+8. In the third place, open and flat though the flower be, it is
+monopetalous; all the four arms of the cross strictly becoming one in the
+centre; so that, though the blue foils _look_ no less sharply separate than
+those of a buttercup or a cistus; and are so delicate that one expects them
+to fall from their stalk if we breathe too near,--do but lay hold of
+one,--and, at the touch, the entire blossom is lifted from its stalk, and
+may be laid, in perfect shape, on our paper before us, as easily as if it
+had been a nicely made-up blue bonnet, lifted off its stand by the
+milliner.
+
+I pause here, to consider a little; because I find myself mixing up two
+characteristics which have nothing necessary in their relation;--namely,
+the unity of the blossom, and its coming easily off the stalk. The separate
+petals of the cistus and cherry fall as easily as the foxglove drops its
+bells;--on the other hand, there are monopetalous things that don't drop,
+but hold on like the convoluta,[19] and make the rest of the tree sad for
+their dying. I do not see my way to any systematic noting of decadent or
+persistent corolla; but, in passing, we may thank the veronica for never
+allowing us to see how it fades,[20] and being always cheerful and lovely,
+while it is with us.
+
+9. And for a farther specialty, I think we should take note of the purity
+and simplicity of its _floral_ blue, not sprinkling itself with unwholesome
+sugar like a larkspur, nor varying into coppery or turquoise-like hue as
+the forget-me-not; but keeping itself as modest as a blue print, pale, in
+the most frequent kinds; but pure exceedingly; and rejoicing in fellowship
+with the grey of its native rocks. The palest of all I think it will be
+well to remember as Veronica Clara, the "Poor Clare" of Veronicas. I find
+this note on it in my diary,--
+
+'The flower of an exquisite grey-white, like lichen, or shaded hoar-frost,
+or dead silver; making the long-weathered stones it grew upon perfect with
+a finished modesty of paleness, as if the flower _could_ be blue, and would
+not, for their sake. Laying its fine small leaves along in embroidery, like
+Anagallis tenella,--indescribable in the tender feebleness of
+it--afterwards as it grew, dropping the little blossoms from the base of
+the spire, before the buds at the top had blown. Gathered, it was happy
+beside me, with a little water under a stone, and put out one pale blossom
+after another, day by day.'
+
+10. Lastly, and for a high worthiness, in my estimate, note that it is
+_wild_, of the wildest, and proud in pure descent of race; submitting
+itself to no follies of the cur-breeding florist. Its species, though many
+resembling each other, are severally constant in aspect, and easily
+recognizable; and I have never seen it provoked to glare into any gigantic
+impudence at a flower show. Fortunately, perhaps, it is scentless, and so
+despised.
+
+11. Before I attempt arranging its families, we must note that while the
+corolla itself is one of the most constant in form, and so distinct from
+all other blossoms that it may be always known at a glance; the leaves and
+habit of growth vary so greatly in families of different climates, and
+those born for special situations, moist or dry, and the like, that it is
+quite impossible to characterize Veronic, or Veronique, vegetation in
+general terms. One can say, comfortably, of a strawberry, that it is a
+creeper, without expecting at the next moment to see a steeple of
+strawberry blossoms rise to contradict us;--we can venture to say of a
+foxglove that it grows in a spire, without any danger of finding, farther
+on, a carpet of prostrate and entangling digitalis; and we may pronounce of
+a buttercup that it grows mostly in meadows, without fear of finding
+ourselves, at the edge of the next thicket, under the shadow of a
+buttercup-bush growing into valuable timber. But the Veronica reclines with
+the lowly,[21] upon occasion, and aspires, with the proud; is here the
+pleased companion of the ground-ivies, and there the unrebuked rival of the
+larkspurs: on the rocks of Coniston it effaces itself almost into the film
+of a lichen; it pierces the snows of Iceland with the gentian: and in the
+Falkland Islands is a white-blossomed evergreen, of which botanists are in
+dispute whether it be Veronica or Olive.
+
+12. Of these many and various forms, I find the manners and customs alike
+inconstant; and this of especially singular in them--that the Alpine and
+northern species bloom hardily in contest with the retiring snows, while
+with us they wait till the spring is past, and offer themselves to us only
+in consolation for the vanished violet and primrose. As we farther examine
+the ways of plants, I suppose we shall find some that determine upon a
+fixed season, and will bloom methodically in June or July, whether in
+Abyssinia or Greenland; and others, like the violet and crocus, which are
+flowers of the spring, at whatever time of the favouring or frowning year
+the spring returns to their country. I suppose also that botanists and
+gardeners know all these matters thoroughly: but they don't put them into
+their books, and the clear notions of them only come to me now, as I think
+and watch.
+
+13. Broadly, however, the families of the Veronica fall into three main
+divisions,--those which have round leaves lobed at the edge, like ground
+ivy; those which have small thyme-like leaves; and those which have long
+leaves like a foxglove's, only smaller--never more than two or two and a
+half inches long. I therefore take them in these connections, though
+without any bar between the groups; only separating the Regina from the
+other thyme-leaved ones, to give her due precedence; and the rest will then
+arrange themselves into twenty families, easily distinguishable and
+memorable.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. IV.]
+
+I have chosen for Veronica Regina, the brave Icelandic one, which pierces
+the snow in first spring, with lovely small shoots of perfectly set leaves,
+no larger than a grain of wheat; the flowers in a lifted cluster of five or
+six together, not crowded, yet not loose; large, for veronica--about the
+size of a silver penny, or say half an inch across--deep blue, with ruby
+centre.
+
+My woodcut, Fig. 4, is outlined[22] from the beautiful engraving D.
+342,[23]--there called 'fruticulosa,' from the number of the young shoots.
+
+14. Beneath the Regina, come the twenty easily distinguished families,
+namely:--
+
+1. Chamædrys. 'Ground-oak.' I cannot tell why so called--its small and
+rounded leaves having nothing like oak leaves about them, except the
+serration, which is common to half, at least, of all leaves that grow. But
+the idea is all over Europe, apparently. Fr. 'petit chêne:' German and
+English 'Germander,' a merely corrupt form of Chamædrys.
+
+The representative English veronica "Germander Speedwell"--very prettily
+drawn in S. 986; too tall and weed-like in D. 448.
+
+2. Hederifolia. Ivy-leaved: but more properly, cymbalaria-leaved. It is the
+English field representative, though blue-flowered, of the Byzantine white
+veronica, V. Cymbalaria, very beautifully drawn in G. 9. Hederifolia well
+in D. 428.
+
+3. Agrestis. Fr. 'Rustique.' We ought however clearly to understand whether
+'agrestis,' used by English botanists, is meant to imply a literally field
+flower, or only a 'rustic' one, which might as properly grow in a wood. I
+shall always myself use 'agrestis' in the literal sense, and 'rustica' for
+'rustique.' I see no reason, in the present case, for separating the Polite
+from the Rustic flower: the agrestis, D. 449 and S. 971, seems to me not
+more meekly recumbent, nor more frankly cultureless, than the so-called
+Polita, S. 972: there seems also no French acknowledgment of its
+politeness, and the Greek family, G. 8, seem the rudest and wildest of all.
+
+Quite a _field_ flower it is, I believe, lying always low on the ground;
+recumbent, but not creeping. Note this difference: no fastening roots are
+thrown out by the reposing stems of this Veronica; a creeping or accurately
+'rampant' plant roots itself in advancing. Conf. Nos. 5, 6.
+
+4. Arvensis. We have yet to note a still finer distinction in epithet.
+'Agrestis' will properly mean a flower of the open ground--yet not caring
+whether the piece of earth be cultivated or not, so long as it is under
+clear sky. But when _agri_-culture has turned the unfruitful acres into
+'arva beata,'--if then the plant thrust itself between the furrows of the
+plough, it is properly called 'Arvensis.'
+
+I don't quite see my way to the same distinction in English,--perhaps I may
+get into the habit, as time goes on, of calling the Arvenses consistently
+furrow-flowers, and the Agrestes field-flowers. Furrow-veronica is a
+tiresomely long name, but must do for the present, as the best
+interpretation of its Latin character, "vulgatissima in cultis et arvis."
+D. 515. The blossom itself is exquisitely delicate; and we may be thankful,
+both here and in Denmark, for such a lovely 'vulgate.'
+
+5. Montana. D. 1201. The first really creeping plant we have had to notice.
+It throws out roots from the recumbent stems. Otherwise like agrestis, it
+has leaves like ground-ivy. Called a wood species in the text of D.
+
+6. Persica. An eastern form, but now perfectly naturalized here--D. 1982;
+S. 973. The flowers very large, and extremely beautiful, but only one
+springing from each leaf-axil.
+
+Leaves and stem like Montana; and also creeping with new-roots at
+intervals.
+
+7. Triphylla, (not triphyll_os_,--see Flora Suecica, 22). Meaning
+trifid-leaved; but the leaf is really divided into five lobes, not
+three--see S. 974, and G. 10. The palmate form of the leaf seems a mere
+caprice, and indicates no transitional form in the plant: it may be
+accepted as only a momentary compliment of mimicry to the geraniums. The
+Siberian variety, 'multifida,' C. 1679, divides itself almost as the
+submerged leaves of the water-ranunculus.
+
+The triphylla itself is widely diffused, growing alike on the sandy fields
+of Kent, and of Troy. In D. 627 is given an extremely delicate and minute
+northern type, the flowers springing as in Persica, one from each
+leaf-axil, and at distant intervals.
+
+8. Officinalis. D. 248, S. 294. Fr. 'Veronique officinale'; (Germ.
+Gebrauchlicher Ehrenpreis,) our commonest English and Welsh speedwell;
+richest in cluster and frankest in roadside growth, whether on bank or
+rock; but assuredly liking _either_ a bank _or_ a rock, and the top of a
+wall better than the shelter of one. Uncountable 'myriads,' I am tempted to
+write, but, cautiously and literally, 'hundreds' of blossoms--if one
+_could_ count,--ranging certainly towards the thousand in some groups, all
+bright at once, make our Westmoreland lanes look as if they were decked for
+weddings, in early summer. In the Danish Flora it is drawn small and poor;
+its southern type being the true one: but it is difficult to explain the
+difference between the look of a flower which really _suffers_, as in this
+instance, by a colder climate, and becomes mean and weak, as well as
+dwarfed; and one which is braced and brightened by the cold, though
+diminished, as if under the charge and charm of an affectionate fairy, and
+becomes a joyfully patriotic inheritor of wilder scenes and skies.
+Medicinal, to soul and body alike, this gracious and domestic flower;
+though astringent and bitter in the juice. It is the Welsh deeply honoured
+'Fluellen.'--See final note on the myth of Veronica, see § 18.
+
+9. Thymifolia. Thyme-leaved, G. 6. Of course the longest possible
+word--serpyllifolia--is used in S. 978. It is a high mountain plant,
+growing on the top of Crete as the snow retires; and the Veronica minor of
+Gerarde; "the roote is small and threddie, taking hold of the _upper
+surface_ of the earth, where it spreadeth." So also it is drawn as a
+creeper in F. 492, where the flower appears to be oppressed and concealed
+by the leafage.
+
+10. Minuta, called 'hirsuta' in S. 985: an ugly characteristic to name the
+lovely little thing by. The distinct blue lines in the petals might perhaps
+justify 'picta' or 'lineata,' rather than an epithet of size; but I suppose
+it is Gerarde's Minima, and so leave it, more safely named as 'minute' than
+'least.' For I think the next variety may dispute the leastness.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. V.]
+
+11. Verna. D. 252. Mountains, in dry places in early spring. Upright, and
+confused in the leafage, which is sharp-pointed and close set, much hiding
+the blossom, but of extreme elegance, fit for a sacred foreground; as any
+gentle student will feel, who copies this outline from the Flora Danica,
+Fig. 5.
+
+12. Peregrina. Another extremely small variety, nearly pink in colour,
+passing into bluish lilac and white. American; but called, I do not see
+why, 'Veronique _voyageuse_,' by the French, and Fremder Ehrenpreis in
+Germany. Given as a frequent English weed in S. 927.
+
+13. Alpina. Veronique des Alpes. Gebirgs Ehrenpreis. Still minute; its
+scarcely distinct flowers forming a close head among the leaves;
+round-petalled in D. 16, but sharp, as usual, in S. 980. On the Norway Alps
+in grassy places; and in Scotland by the side of mountain rills; but rare.
+On Ben Nevis and Lachin y Gair (S.)
+
+14. Scutellata. From the shield-like shape of its seed-vessels. Veronique à
+Ecusson; Schildfruchtiger Ehrenpreis. But the seed-vessels are more heart
+shape than shield. Marsh Speedwell. S. 988, D. 209,--in the one pink, in
+the other blue; but again in D. 1561, pink.
+
+"In flooded meadows, common." (D.) A spoiled and scattered form; the seeds
+too conspicuous, but the flowers very delicate, hence 'Gratiola minima' in
+Gesner. The confused ramification of the clusters worth noting, in relation
+to the equally straggling fibres of root.
+
+15. Spicata. S. 982: very prettily done, representing the inside of the
+flower as deep blue, the outside pale. The top of the spire, all calices,
+the calyx being indeed, through all the veronicas, an important and
+persistent member.
+
+The tendency to arrange itself in spikes is to be noted as a degradation of
+the veronic character; connecting it on one side with the snapdragons, on
+the other with the ophryds. In Veronica Ophrydea, (C. 2210,) this
+resemblance to the contorted tribe is carried so far that "the corolla of
+the veronica becomes irregular, the tube gibbous, the faux (throat) hairy,
+and three of the laciniæ (lobes of petals) variously twisted." The spire of
+blossom, violet-coloured, is then close set, and exactly resembles an
+ophryd, except in being sharper at the top. The engraved outline of the
+blossom is good, and very curious.
+
+16. Gentianoides. This is the most directly and curiously imitative among
+the--shall we call them--'histrionic' types of Veronica. It grows exactly
+like a clustered upright gentian; has the same kind of leaves at its root,
+and springs with the same bright vitality among the retiring snows of the
+Bithynian Olympus. (G. 5.) If, however, the Caucasian flower, C. 1002, be
+the same, it has lost its perfect grace in luxuriance, growing as large as
+an asphodel, and with root-leaves half a foot long.
+
+The petals are much veined; and this, of all veronicas, has the lower petal
+smallest in proportion to the three above,--"triplò aut quadruplò minori."
+(G.)
+
+17. Stagnarum. Marsh-Veronica. The last four families we have been
+examining vary from the typical Veronicas not only in their lance-shaped
+clusters, but in their lengthened, and often every way much enlarged leaves
+also: and the two which we now will take in association, 17 and 18, carry
+the change in aspect farthest of any, being both of them true water-plants,
+with strong stems and thick leaves. The present name of my Veronica
+Stagnarum is however V. anagallis, a mere insult to the little water
+primula, which one plant of the Veronica would make fifty of. This is a
+rank water-weed, having confused bunches of blossom and seed, like unripe
+currants, dangling from the leaf-axils. So that where the little triphylla,
+(No. 7, above,) has only one blossom, daintily set, and well seen, this has
+a litter of twenty-five or thirty on a long stalk, of which only three or
+four are well out as flowers, and the rest are mere knobs of bud or seed.
+The stalk is thick (half an inch round at the bottom), the leaves long and
+misshapen. "Frequens in fossis," D. 203. French, Mouron d'Eau, but I don't
+know the root or exact meaning of Mouron.
+
+An ugly Australian species, 'labiata,' C. 1660, has leaves two inches long,
+of the shape of an aloe's, and partly aloeine in texture, "sawed with
+unequal, fleshy, pointed teeth."
+
+18. Fontium. Brook-Veronica. Brook-_Lime_, the Anglo-Saxon 'lime' from
+Latin limus, meaning the soft mud of streams. German 'Bach-bunge'
+(Brook-purse?) ridiculously changed by the botanists into 'Beccabunga,' for
+a Latin name! Very beautiful in its crowded green leaves as a
+stream-companion; rich and bright more than watercress. See notice of it at
+Matlock, in 'Modern Painters,' vol. v.
+
+19. Clara. Veronique des rochers. Saxatilis, I suppose, in Sowerby, but am
+not sure of having identified that with my own favourite, for which I
+therefore keep the name 'Clara,' (see above, § 9); and the other rock
+variety, if indeed another, mast be remembered, together with it.
+
+20. Glauca. G. 7. And this, at all events, with the Clara, is to be
+remembered as closing the series of twenty families, acknowledged by
+Proserpina. It is a beautiful low-growing ivy-leaved type, with flowers of
+subdued lilac blue. On Mount Hymettus: no other locality given in the Flora
+Græca.
+
+15. I am sorry, and shall always be so, when the varieties of any flower
+which I have to commend to the student's memory, exceed ten or twelve in
+number; but I am content to gratify his pride with lengthier task, if
+indeed he will resign himself to the imperative close of the more inclusive
+catalogue, and be content to know the twelve, or sixteen, or twenty,
+acknowledged families, thoroughly; and only in their illustration to think
+of rarer forms. The object of 'Proserpina' is to make him happily cognizant
+of the common aspect of Greek and English flowers; under the term
+'English,' comprehending the Saxon, Celtic, Norman, and Danish Floras. Of
+the evergreen shrub alluded to in § 11 above, the Veronica Decussata of the
+Pacific, which is "a bushy evergreen, with beautifully set cross-leaves,
+and white blossoms scented like olea fragrans," I should like him only to
+read with much surprise, and some incredulity, in Pinkerton's or other
+entertaining travellers' voyages.
+
+16. And of the families given, he is to note for the common simple
+characteristic, that they are quatrefoils referred to a more or less
+elevated position on a central stem, and having, in that relation, the
+lowermost petal diminished, contrary to the almost universal habit of other
+flowers to develope in such a position the lower petal chiefly, that it may
+have its full share of light. You will find nothing but blunder and
+embarrassment result from any endeavour to enter into further particulars,
+such as "the relation of the dissepiment with respect to the valves of the
+capsule," etc., etc., since "in the various species of Veronica almost
+every kind of dehiscence may be observed" (C. under V. perfoliata, 1936, an
+Australian species). Sibthorpe gives the entire definition of Veronica with
+only one epithet added to mine, "Corolla quadrifida, _rotata_, laciniâ
+infimâ angustiore," but I do not know what 'rotata' here means, as there is
+no appearance of revolved action in the petals, so far as I can see.
+
+17. Of the mythic or poetic significance of the veronica, there is less to
+be said than of its natural beauty. I have not been able to discover with
+what feeling, or at what time, its sacred name was originally given; and
+the legend of S. Veronica herself is, in the substance of it, irrational,
+and therefore incredible. The meaning of the term 'rational,' as applied to
+a legend or miracle, is, that there has been an intelligible need for the
+permission of the miracle at the time when it is recorded; and that the
+nature and manner of the act itself should be comprehensible in the scope.
+There was thus quite simple need for Christ to feed the multitudes, and to
+appear to S. Paul; but no need, so far as human intelligence can reach, for
+the reflection of His features upon a piece of linen which could be seen by
+not one in a million of the disciples to whom He might more easily, at any
+time, manifest Himself personally and perfectly. Nor, I believe, has the
+story of S. Veronica ever been asserted to be other than symbolic by the
+sincere teachers of the Church; and, even so far as in that merely
+explanatory function, it became the seal of an extreme sorrow, it is not
+easy to understand how the pensive fable was associated with a flower so
+familiar, so bright, and so popularly of good omen, as the Speedwell.
+
+18. Yet, the fact being actually so, and this consecration of the veronica
+being certainly far more ancient and earnest than the faintly romantic and
+extremely absurd legend of the forget-me-not; the speedwell has assuredly
+the higher claim to be given and accepted as a token of pure and faithful
+love, and to be trusted as a sweet sign that the innocence of affection is
+indeed more frequent, and the appointed destiny of its faith more
+fortunate, than our inattentive hearts have hitherto discerned.
+
+19. And this the more, because the recognized virtues and uses of the plant
+are real and manifold; and the ideas of a peculiar honourableness and worth
+of life connected with it by the German popular name 'Honour-prize'; while
+to the heart of the British race, the same thought is brought home by
+Shakespeare's adoption of the flower's Welsh name, for the faithfullest
+common soldier of his ideal king. As a lover's pledge, therefore, it does
+not merely mean memory;--for, indeed, why should love be thought of as such
+at all, if it need to promise not to forget?--but the blossom is
+significant also of the lover's best virtues, patience in suffering, purity
+in thought, gaiety in courage, and serenity in truth: and therefore I make
+it, worthily, the clasping and central flower of the Cytherides.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+GIULIETTA.
+
+1. Supposing that, in early life, one had the power of living to one's
+fancy,--and why should we not, if the said fancy were restrained by the
+knowledge of the two great laws concerning our nature, that happiness is
+increased, not by the enlargement of the possessions, but of the heart; and
+days lengthened, not by the crowding of emotions, but the economy of
+them?--if thus taught, we had, I repeat, the ordering of our house and
+estate in our own hands, I believe no manner of temperance in pleasure
+would be better rewarded than that of making our gardens gay only with
+common flowers; and leaving those which needed care for their transplanted
+life to be found in their native places when we travelled. So long as I had
+crocus and daisy in the spring, roses in the summer, and hollyhocks and
+pinks in the autumn, I used to be myself independent of farther
+horticulture,--and it is only now that I am old, and since pleasant
+travelling has become impossible to me, that I am thankful to have the
+white narcissus in my borders, instead of waiting to walk through the
+fragrance of the meadows of Clarens; and pleased to see the milkwort blue
+on my scythe-mown banks, since I cannot gather it any more on the rocks of
+the Vosges, or in the divine glens of Jura.
+
+2. Among the losses, all the more fatal in being unfelt, brought upon us by
+the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the
+loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day,--whether
+indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as
+to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the common
+daily flattery on which the power of the British press first depends, I
+cannot judge;--but, for one or other of such motives, I saw lately in some
+illustrated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fashioned and modern
+travel, representing, as the type of things passed away, the outside
+passengers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent distress from the
+swirl of a winter snowstorm; and for type of the present Elysian
+dispensation, the inside of a first-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful
+young lady in the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing,
+Daily news in hand, with a young officer--her fortunate vis-à-vis--on the
+subject of our military successes in Afghanistan and Zululand.[24]
+
+3. I will not, in presenting--it must not be called the other side, but the
+supplementary, and wilfully omitted, facts, of this ideal,--oppose, as I
+fairly might, the discomforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the
+chariot-and-four, with outriders and courier, of ancient noblesse. I will
+compare only the actual facts, in the former and in latter years, of my own
+journey from Paris to Geneva. As matters are now arranged, I find myself,
+at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused crowd with which I
+am presently to contend for a seat, in the dim light and cigar-stench of
+the great station of the Lyons line. Making slow way through the
+hostilities of the platform, in partly real, partly weak politeness, as may
+be, I find the corner seats of course already full of prohibitory cloaks
+and umbrellas; but manage to get a middle back one; the net overhead is
+already surcharged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I squeeze my
+desk as well as I can between my legs, and arrange what wraps I have about
+my knees and shoulders. Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with
+nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under
+the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or
+less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and
+encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing
+themselves for sleep: the last arrangement for the night being to shut up
+both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary
+modification of the night air.
+
+4. The banging and bumping of the carriages over the turn-tables wakes me
+up as I am beginning to doze, at Fontainebleau, and again at Sens; and the
+trilling and thrilling of the little telegraph bell establishes itself in
+my ears, and stays there, trilling me at last into a shivering, suspicious
+sort of sleep, which, with a few vaguely fretful shrugs and fidgets,
+carries me as far as Tonnerre, where the 'quinze minutes d'arret'
+revolutionize everything; and I get a turn or two on the platform, and
+perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear morning; and so
+generally keep awake past Mont Bard, remembering the happy walks one used
+to have on the terrace under Buffon's tower, and thence watching, if
+perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film of moonlight may
+show the far undulating masses of the hills of Citeaux. But most likely one
+knows the place where the great old view used to be only by the sensible
+quickening of the pace as the train turns down the incline, and crashes
+through the trenched cliffs into the confusion and high clattering vault of
+the station at Dijon.
+
+5. And as my journey is almost always in the springtime, the twisted spire
+of the cathedral usually shows itself against the first grey of dawn, as we
+run out again southwards: and resolving to watch the sunrise, I fall more
+complacently asleep,--and the sun is really up by the time one has to
+change carriages, and get morning coffee at Macon. And from Amberieux,
+through the Jura valley, one is more or less feverishly happy and thankful,
+not so much for being in sight of Mont Blanc again, as in having got
+through the nasty and gloomy night journey; and then the sight of the Rhone
+and the Salève seems only like a dream, presently to end in nothingness;
+till, covered with dust, and feeling as if one never should be fit for
+anything any more, one staggers down the hill to the Hotel des Bergues, and
+sees the dirtied Rhone, with its new iron bridge, and the smoke of a new
+factory exactly dividing the line of the aiguilles of Chamouni.
+
+6. That is the journey as it is now,--and as, for me, it must be; except on
+foot, since there is now no other way of making it. But this _was_ the way
+we used to manage it in old days:--
+
+Very early in Continental transits we had found out that the family
+travelling carriage, taking much time and ingenuity to load, needing at the
+least three, usually four--horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only
+jolted and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every way to
+more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehicles; getting itself jammed in
+archways, wrenched with damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of
+justifiable reprobation among market stalls. So when we knew better, my
+father and mother always had their own old-fashioned light two-horse
+carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quantity of front and
+side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a
+fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot;
+and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk,
+without troubling the driver to think of me.
+
+7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine
+glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judée were mere pyramids of
+purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among
+the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new
+lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding
+vines of the coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the
+'Seven Lamps,' in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his
+wholly matchless way in the last chapter of 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The
+next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always
+spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Monday, the drive of drives, through
+the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the
+vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges
+of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the
+'Derniers Kochers' and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew.
+Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for
+that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and
+on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.
+
+And on Thursday, the _eighth or ninth_ day from Paris, days all spent
+patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps
+unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and
+cloud.
+
+8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such
+travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling
+well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not
+be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with
+sore shortcomings. It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness
+of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of
+education for youth;--and my certainty that a true knowledge of their
+native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions
+of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me
+to gather into system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts.[25] And
+of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want chiefly the
+details of the Flora, I find none; and in this instance of the milkwort,
+whose name I was first told by the Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then
+walking with me on the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges,
+west of Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint that, being
+then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to draw the great plain and
+distant spire, it was of no use trying in the poor remainder of life to do
+anything serious,--then, and there, I say, for the first time examining the
+strange little flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone
+crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I don't find a single note of its preferences
+or antipathies in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it
+chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to which it
+condescends, on the Alps or Apennines.
+
+9. But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at Brantwood, that it is
+capricious and fastidious beyond any other little blossom I know of. In
+laying out the rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to
+remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of stone, among which
+nearly every other wild flower that likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to
+root itself. But at the top of all, one terrace was brought to
+mathematically true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed with
+delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept duly trim by the
+scythe. And _only_ on this terrace does the Giulietta choose to show
+herself,--and even there, not in any consistent places, but gleaming out
+here in one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected sky
+through cloud; and entirely refusing to allow either bank or terrace to be
+mown the least trim during _her_ time of disport there. So spared and
+indulged, there are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds; no
+more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by watch through day and
+night, than her recumbent clusters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing
+through the grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue.
+
+10. I will not attempt at present to arrange the varieties of the
+Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and presumably characteristic
+forms belong to the Cape; and only since Mr. Froude came back from his
+African explorings have I been able to get any clear idea of the brilliancy
+and associated infinitude of the Cape flowers. If I could but write down
+the substance of what he has told me, in the course of a chat or two, which
+have been among the best privileges of my recent stay in London, (prolonged
+as it has been by recurrence of illness,) it would be a better summary of
+what should be generally known in the natural history of southern plants
+than I could glean from fifty volumes of horticultural botany. In the
+meantime, everything being again thrown out of gear by the aforesaid
+illness, I must let this piece of 'Proserpina' break off, as most of my
+work does--and as perhaps all of it may soon do--leaving only suggestion
+for the happier research of the students who trust me thus far.
+
+11. Some essential points respecting the flower I shall note, however,
+before ending. There is one large and frequent species of it of which the
+flowers are delicately yellow, touched with tawny red, forming one of the
+chief elements of wild foreground vegetation in the healthy districts of
+hard Alpine limestone.[26] This is, I believe, the only European type of
+the large Cape varieties, in all of which, judging from such plates as have
+been accessible to me, the crests or fringes of the lower petal are less
+conspicuous than in the smaller species; and the flower almost takes the
+aspect of a broom-blossom or pease-blossom. In the smaller European
+varieties, the white fringes of the lower petal are the most important and
+characteristic part of the flower, and they are, among European wild
+flowers, absolutely without any likeness of associated structure. The
+fringes or crests which, towards the origin of petals, so often give a
+frosted or gemmed appearance to the centres of flowers, are here thrown to
+the extremity of the petal, and suggest an almost coralline structure of
+blossom, which in no other instance whatever has been imitated, still less
+carried out into its conceivable varieties of form. How many such varieties
+might have been produced if these fringes of the Giulietta, or those
+already alluded to of Lucia nivea, had been repeated and enlarged; as the
+type, once adopted for complex bloom in the thistle-head, is multiplied in
+the innumerable gradations of thistle, teasel, hawkweed, and aster! We
+might have had flowers edged with lace finer than was ever woven by mortal
+fingers, or tasselled and braided with fretwork of silver, never
+tarnished--or hoarfrost that grew brighter in the sun. But it was not to
+be, and after a few hints of what might be done in this kind, the Fate, or
+Folly, or, on recent theories, the extreme fitness--and consequent
+survival, of the Thistles and Dandelions, entirely drives the fringed
+Lucias and blue-flushing milkworts out of common human neighbourhood, to
+live recluse lives with the memories of the abbots of Cluny, and pastors of
+Piedmont.
+
+12. I have called the Giulietta 'blue-_flushing_' because it is one of the
+group of exquisite flowers which at the time of their own blossoming,
+breathe their colour into the surrounding leaves and supporting stem. Very
+notably the Grape hyacinth and Jura hyacinth, and some of the Vestals,
+empurpling all their green leaves even to the ground: a quite distinct
+nature in the flower, observe, this possession of a power to kindle the
+leaf and stem with its own passion, from that of the heaths, roses, or
+lilies, where the determined bracts or calicos assert themselves in
+opposition to the blossom, as little pine-leaves, or mosses, or brown paper
+packages, and the like.
+
+13. The Giulietta, however, is again entirely separate from the other
+leaf-flushing blossoms, in that, after the two green leaves next the flower
+have glowed with its blue, while it lived, they do not fade or waste with
+it, but return to their own former green simplicity, and close over it to
+protect the seed. I only know this to be the case with the Giulietta
+Regina; but suppose it to be (with variety of course in the colours) a
+condition in other species,--though of course nothing is ever said of it in
+the botanical accounts of them. I gather, however, from Curtis's careful
+drawings that the prevailing colour of the Cape species is purple, thus
+justifying still further my placing them among the Cytherides; and I am
+content to take the descriptive epithets at present given them, for the
+following five of this southern group, hoping that they may be explained
+for me afterwards by helpful friends.
+
+14. Bracteolata, C. 345. Oppositifolia, C. 492. Speciosa, C. 1790. These
+three all purple, and scarcely distinguishable from sweet pease-blossom,
+only smaller.
+
+Stipulacea, C. 1715. Small, and very beautiful, lilac and purple, with a
+leaf and mode of growth like rosemary. The "Foxtail" milkwort, whose name I
+don't accept, C. 1006, is intermediate between this and the next species.
+
+15. Mixta, C. 1714. I don't see what mingling is meant, except that it is
+just like Erica tetralix in the leaf, only, apparently, having little
+four-petalled pinks for blossoms. This appearance is thus botanically
+explained. I do not myself understand the description, but copy it,
+thinking it may be of use to somebody. "The apex of the carina is expanded
+into a two-lobed plain petal, the lobes of which are emarginate. This
+appendix is of a bright rose colour, and forms the principal part of the
+flower." The describer relaxes, or relapses, into common language so far as
+to add that 'this appendix' "dispersed among the green foliage in every
+part of the shrub, gives it a pretty lively appearance."
+
+Perhaps this may also be worth extracting.
+
+"Carina, deeply channeled, _of a saturated purple_ within, sides folded
+together, so as to include and firmly embrace the style and stamens, which,
+when arrived at maturity, upon being moved, escape elastically from their
+confinement, and strike against the two erect petals or alæ--by which the
+pollen is dispersed.
+
+"Stem shrubby, with long flexile branches." (Length or height not told. I
+imagine like an ordinary heath's.)
+
+The term 'carina,' occurring twice in the above description, is peculiar to
+the structure of the pease and milk-worts; we will examine it afterwards.
+The European varieties of the milkwort, except the chamæbuxus, are all
+minute,--and, their ordinary epithets being at least inoffensive, I give
+them for reference till we find prettier ones; altering only the Calcarea,
+because we could not have a 'Chalk Juliet,' and two varieties of the
+Regina, changed for reason good--her name, according to the last modern
+refinements of grace and ease in pronunciation, being Eu-vularis, var.
+genuina! My readers may more happily remember her and her sister as
+follows:--
+
+16. (I.) Giulietta Regina. Pure blue. The same in colour, form, and size,
+throughout Europe.
+
+(II.) Giulietta Soror-Reginæ. Pale, reddish-blue or white in the flower,
+and smaller in the leaf, otherwise like the Regina.
+
+(III.) Giulietta Depressa. The smallest of those I can find drawings of.
+Flowers, blue; lilac in the fringe, and no bigger than pins' heads; the
+leaves quite gem-like in minuteness and order.
+
+(IV.) Giulietta Cisterciana. Its present name, 'Calcarea,' is meant, in
+botanic Latin, to express its growth on limestone or chalk mountains. But
+we might as well call the South Down sheep, Calcareous mutton. My epithet
+will rightly associate it with the Burgundian hills round Cluny and
+Citeaux. Its ground leaves are much larger than those of the Depressa; the
+flower a little larger, but very pale.
+
+(V.) Giulietta Austriaca. Pink, and very lovely, with bold cluster of
+ground leaves, but itself minute--almost dwarf. Called 'small bitter
+milkwort' by S. How far distinct from the next following one, Norwegian, is
+not told.
+
+The above five kinds are given by Sowerby as British, but I have never
+found the Austriaca myself.
+
+(VI.) Giulietta Amara. Norwegian. Very quaint in blossom outline, like a
+little blue rabbit with long ears. D. 1169.
+
+17. Nobody tells me why either this last or No. 5 have been called bitter;
+and Gerarde's five kinds are distinguished only by colour--blue, red,
+white, purple, and "the dark, of an overworn ill-favoured colour, which
+maketh it to differ from all others of his kind." I find no account of this
+ill-favoured one elsewhere. The white is my Soror Reginæ; the red must be
+the Austriaca; but the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn
+indeed. All of them must have been more common in Gerarde's time than now,
+for he goes on to say "Milk-woort is called _Ambarualis flos_. so called
+because it doth specially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or
+Rogation-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in the countries to
+walk the procession do make themselves garlands and nosegaies, in English
+we may call it Crosse flower, Gang flower, Rogation flower, and
+Milk-woort."
+
+18. Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the Cytherides, I too
+hastily concluded that the ascription to this plant of helpfulness to
+nursing mothers was 'more than ordinarily false'; thinking that its rarity
+could never have allowed it to be fairly tried. If indeed true, or in any
+degree true, the flower has the best right of all to be classed with the
+Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as
+we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens
+with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter
+gluttonies with dying and useless ones.
+
+19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the
+hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster--nor the chance of watching
+one in seed:--The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of
+April, and leaves no sign of itself--that _I_ ever found. The botanists
+tell me that its fruit "dehisces loculicidally," which I suppose is botanic
+for "splits like boxes," (but boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used
+to make and handle them before railways). Out of the split boxes fall
+seeds--too few; and, as aforesaid, the plant never seems to grow again in
+the same spot. I should thankfully receive any notes from friends happy
+enough to live near milkwort banks, on the manner of its nativity.
+
+20. Meanwhile, the Thistle, and the Nettle, and the Dock, and the Dandelion
+are cared for in their generations by the finest arts of--Providence, shall
+we say? or of the spirits appointed to punish our own want of Providence?
+May I ask the reader to look back to the seventh chapter of the first
+volume, for it contains suggestions of thoughts which came to me at a time
+of very earnest and faithful inquiry, set down, I now see too shortly,
+under the press of reading they involved, but intelligible enough if they
+are read as slowly as they were written, and especially note the paragraph
+of summary of p. 121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and as
+_judge;_ watching and rewarding the conditions which induce adversity and
+prosperity in the kingdoms of men: comparing with it carefully the close of
+the fourth chapter, p. 85,[27] which contains, for the now recklessly
+multiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential to their
+skill, and inexorable upon their labour.
+
+21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more than his usual care
+in the frontispiece to this number of 'Proserpina,' was one of many
+executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and
+later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of
+the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a
+consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon
+jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in
+a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.[28]
+
+22. But also, in beginning 'Proserpina,' I intended to give many
+illustrations of the light and shade of foreground leaves belonging to the
+nobler groups of thistles, because I thought they had been neglected by
+ordinary botanical draughtsmen; not knowing at that time either the
+original drawings at Oxford for the 'Flora Græca,' or the nobly engraved
+plates executed in the close of the last century for the 'Flora Danica' and
+'Flora Londinensis.' The latter is in the most difficult portraiture of the
+larger plants, even the more wonderful of the two; and had I seen the
+miracles of skill, patience, and faithful study which are collected in the
+first and second volumes, published in 1777 and 1798, I believe my own work
+would never have been undertaken.[29] Such as it is, however, I may still,
+health being granted me, persevere in it; for my own leaf and branch
+studies express conditions of shade which even these most exquisite
+botanical plates ignore; and exemplify uses of the pen and pencil which
+cannot be learned from the inimitable fineness of line engraving. The
+frontispiece to this number, for instance, (a seeding head of the commonest
+field-thistle of our London suburbs,) copied with a steel pen on smooth
+grey paper, and the drawing softly touched with white on the nearer thorns,
+may well surpass the effect of the plate.
+
+23. In the following number of 'Proserpina' I have been tempted to follow,
+with more minute notice than usual, the 'conditions of adversity' which, as
+they fret the thistle tribe into jagged malice, have humbled the beauty of
+the great domestic group of the Vestals into confused likenesses of the
+Dragonweed and Nettle: but I feel every hour more and more the necessity of
+separating the treatment of subjects in 'Proserpina' from the microscopic
+curiosities of recent botanic illustration, nor shall this work close, if
+my strength hold, without fulfilling in some sort, the effort begun long
+ago in 'Modern Painters,' to interpret the grace of the larger blossoming
+trees, and the mysteries of leafy form which clothe the Swiss precipice
+with gentleness, and colour with softest azure the rich horizons of England
+and Italy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+BRUNELLA.
+
+1. It ought to have been added to the statements of general law in
+irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this volume, § 6, that if the petals,
+while brought into relations of inequality, still retain their perfect
+petal form,--and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, remain
+clearly _leaves_, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and assume no grotesque
+or obscure outline,--the flower, though injured, is not to be thought of as
+corrupted or misled. But if any of the petals lose their definite character
+as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, or strained into any
+other form or function than that of petals, the flower is to be looked upon
+as affected by some kind of constant evil influence; and, so far as we
+conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the protection or
+affliction of the inferior orders of creatures, it will be felt to bear the
+aspect of possession by, or pollution by, a more or less degraded
+Spirit.[30]
+
+2. I have already enough spoken of the special manifestation of this
+character in the orders Contorta and Satyrium, vol. i., p. 91, and the
+reader will find the parallel aspects of the Draconidæ dwelt upon at length
+in the 86th and 87th paragraphs of the 'Queen of the Air,' where also their
+relation to the labiate group is touched upon. But I am far more
+embarrassed by the symbolism of that group which I called 'Vestales,' from
+their especially domestic character and their serviceable purity; but which
+may be, with more convenience perhaps, simply recognizable as 'Menthæ.'
+
+3. These are, to our northern countries, what the spice-bearing trees are
+in the tropics;--our thyme, lavender, mint, marjoram, and their like,
+separating themselves not less in the health giving or strengthening
+character of their scent from the flowers more or less enervating in
+perfume, as the rose, orange, and violet,--than in their humble colours and
+forms from the grace and splendour of those higher tribes; thus allowing
+themselves to be summed under the general word 'balm' more truly than the
+balsams from which the word is derived. Giving the most pure and healing
+powers to the air around them; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly
+in dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; but only to be
+rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors when dried; not tempting any
+one to luxury, nor expressive of any kind of exultation. Brides do not deck
+themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal arches with mint.
+
+4. It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these flowers have any
+extreme beauty in colour. The blue sage is the only one of vivid hue at
+all; and we never think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or
+bluebell: thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of the other purple
+varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers
+of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is
+scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to
+ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or lappeted as to look at first like
+some imperfect form of snapdragon for the most part spotted also, wrinkled
+as if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, and springing
+out of calices which, in their clustering spines, embody the general
+roughness of the plant.
+
+5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should think me unkind or
+intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and
+at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all
+the sweet reginas of the spring is over--the reign of the silvia and
+anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under
+tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are
+nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up
+the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black
+knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the
+grass,--the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.
+
+6. _P_runell, _or_ Brunell--Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and
+authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnæus, and idly
+following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its
+name--of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in
+English--meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.
+
+7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for
+what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most
+glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its
+hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark
+calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is
+only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And what
+is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the
+scattered blossoms;--of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the
+way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain,
+and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of
+the cluster broken short away altogether.
+
+8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to
+be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes.
+But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to
+entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are
+meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens,
+therefore--to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged
+wasps in it,--and perceive therewith the following particulars.
+
+9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a
+little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is
+grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old
+fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out
+in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of
+fringe.
+
+Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white
+hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose
+of use or decoration--any more than a hearth-brush put for a
+helmet-crest,--and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower
+petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw,
+edged with ghastly teeth,--and yet more, that the hollow within begins to
+suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections
+where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen
+glands.
+
+I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close
+observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to
+physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by
+imagination. Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat
+affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant,
+Brunelle.
+
+10. The truth of all popular traditions as to the healing power of herbs
+will be tried impartially as soon as men again desire to lead healthy
+lives; but I shall not in 'Proserpina' retain any of the names of their
+gathered and dead or distilled substance, but name them always from the
+characters of their life. I retain, however, for this plant its name
+Brunella, Fr. Brunelle, because we may ourselves understand it as a
+derivation from Brune; and I bring it here before the reader's attention as
+giving him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of degradation
+which takes place in the forms of flowers under more or less malefic
+influence, causing distortion and disguise of their floral structure. Thus
+it is not the normal character of a flower petal to have a cluster of
+bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into
+the likeness of a fanged fish's jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the
+likeness of a diseased gland in an animal's throat. A really uncorrupted
+flower suggests none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself.
+
+11. I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, with exactitude which
+has rendered the definition authoritative for all time, the tribe to which
+this Brownie flower belongs, constituting them his fourth class, and
+describing them in terms even more depreciatingly imaginative than any I
+have ventured to use myself. I translate the passage (vol. i., p. 177):--
+
+12. "The name of Labiate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which,
+beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which
+is either single or double. It is proper to a labiate flower,--first, that
+it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat _unifolium_), for the most
+part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper hood (cucullum papyraceum);
+and, secondly, that its pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four
+seeds, which ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their own seed-vessel, by
+which a labiate flower is distinguished from a personate one, whose pistil
+becomes a capsule far divided from the calyx (à calyce longò divisam). And
+a labiate flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which have
+four seeds, in that the lips of a labiate flower have a gape like the face
+of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emulous of animal form."
+
+13. This class is then divided into four sections.
+
+    In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked--"galeatum est, vel
+    falcatum."
+    In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon--"cochlearis
+    instar est excavatum."
+    In the third the upper lip is erect.
+    And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all.
+
+The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once rejecting a classification
+of lipped plants into three classes that have lips, and one that has none,
+and in which the lips of those that have got any, are like helmets and
+spoons.
+
+Linnaeus, in 1758, grouped the family into two divisions, by the form of
+the calyx, (five-fold or two-fold), and then went into the wildest
+confusion in distinction of species,--sometimes by the form of corolla,
+sometimes by that of calyx, sometimes by that of the filaments, sometimes
+by that of the stigma, and sometimes by that of the seed. As, for instance,
+thyme is to be identified by the calyx having hairs in its throat, dead
+nettle by having bristles in its mouth, lion's tail by having bones in its
+anthers (antheræ punctis osseis adspersæ), and teucrium by having its upper
+lip cut in two!
+
+14. St. Hilaire, in 1805, divides again into four sections, but as three of
+these depend on form of corolla, and the fourth on abortion of stamens, the
+reader may conclude practically, that logical division of the family is
+impossible, and that all he can do, or that there is the smallest occasion
+for his doing, is first to understand the typical structure thoroughly, and
+then to know a certain number of forms accurately, grouping the others
+round them at convenient distances; and, finally, to attach to their known
+forms such simple names as may be utterable by children, and memorable by
+old people, with more ease and benefit than the 'Galeopsis Eu-te-trahit,'
+'Lamium Galeobdalon,' or 'Scutellaria Galericulata,'and the like, of modern
+botany. But to do this rightly, I must review and amplify some of my former
+classification, which it will be advisable to do in a separate chapter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+MONACHA.
+
+1. It is not a little vexing to me, in looking over the very little I have
+got done of my planned Systema Proserpinæ, to discover a grave mistake in
+the specifications of Veronica. It is Veronica chamædrys, not officinalis,
+which is our proper English Speedwell, and Welsh Fluellen; and all the
+eighth paragraph, p. 74, properly applies to that. Veronica officinalis is
+an extremely small flower rising on vertical stems out of recumbent leaves;
+and the drawing of it in the Flora Danica, which I mistook for a stunted
+northern state, is quite true of the English species,[32] except that it
+does not express the recumbent action of the leaves. The proper
+representation of ground-leafage has never yet been attempted in any
+botanical work whatever, and as, in recumbent plants, their grouping and
+action can only be seen from above, the plates of them should always have a
+dark and rugged background, not only to indicate the position of the eye,
+but to relieve the forms of the leaves as they were intended to be shown. I
+will try to give some examples in the course of this year.
+
+2. I find also, sorrowfully, that the references are wrong in three, if not
+more, places in that chapter. S. 971 and 972 should be transposed in p. 72.
+S. 294 in p. 74 should be 984. D. 407 should be inserted after Peregrina,
+in p. 76; and 203, in fourth line from bottom of p. 78, should be 903. I
+wish it were likely that these errors had been corrected by my
+readers,--the rarity of the Flora Danica making at present my references
+virtually useless: but I hope in time that our public institutes will
+possess themselves of copies: still more do I hope that some book of the
+kind will be undertaken by English artists and engravers, which shall be
+worthy of our own country.
+
+3. Farther, I get into confusion by not always remembering my own
+nomenclature, and have allowed 'Gentianoides' to remain, for No. 16, though
+I banish Gentian. It will be far better to call this eastern mountain
+species 'Olympica': according to Sibthorpe's localization, "in summâ parte,
+nive solutâ, montis Olympi Bithyni," and the rather that Curtis's plate
+above referred to shows it in luxuriance to be liker an asphodel than a
+gentian.
+
+4. I have also perhaps done wrong in considering Veronica polita and
+agrestis as only varieties, in No. 3. No author tells me why the first is
+called polite, but its blue seems more intense than that of agrestis; and
+as it is above described with attention, vol. i., p. 75, as an example of
+precision in flower-form, we may as well retain it in our list here. It
+will be therefore our twenty-first variety,--it is Loudon's fifty-ninth and
+last. He translates 'polita' simply 'polished,' which is nonsense. I can
+think of nothing to call it but 'dainty,' and will leave it at present
+unchristened.
+
+5. Lastly. I can't think why I omitted V. Humifusa, S. 979, which seems to
+be quite one of the most beautiful of the family--a mountain flower also,
+and one which I ought to find here; but hitherto I know only among the
+mantlings of the ground, V. thymifolia and officinalis. All these, however,
+agree in the extreme prettiness and grace of their crowded leafage,--the
+officinalis, of which the leaves are shown much too coarsely serrated in S.
+984, forming carpets of finished embroidery which I have never yet rightly
+examined, because I mistook them for St. John's wort. They are of a
+beautiful pointed oval form, serrated so finely that they seem smooth in
+distant effect, and covered with equally invisible hairs, which seem to
+collect towards the edge in the variety Hirsuta, S. 985.
+
+For the present, I should like the reader to group the three flowers, S.
+979, 984, 985, under the general name of Humifusa, and to distinguish them
+by a third epithet, which I allow myself when in difficulties, thus:
+
+    V. Humifusa, cærulea, the beautiful blue one, which resembles
+    Spicata.
+    V. Humifusa, officinalis, and,
+    V. Humifusa, hirsuta: the last seems to me extremely interesting, and I
+    hope to find it and study it carefully.
+
+By this arrangement we shall have only twenty-one species to remember: the
+one which chiefly decorates the ground again dividing into the above three.
+
+6. These matters being set right, I pass to the business in hand, which is
+to define as far as possible the subtle relations between the Veronicas and
+Draconidæ, and again between these and the tribe at present called labiate.
+In my classification above, vol. i, p. 200, the Draconidæ include the
+Nightshades; but this was an oversight. Atropa belongs properly to the
+following class, Moiridæ; and my Draconids are intended to include only the
+two great families of Personate and Ringent flowers, which in some degree
+resemble the head of an animal: the representative one being what we call
+'snapdragon,' but the French, careless of its snapping power, 'calf's
+muzzle'--"Muflier, muflande, or muffle de Veau."--Rousseau, 'Lettres,' p.
+19.
+
+7. As I examine his careful and sensible plates of it, I chance also on a
+bit of his text, which, extremely wise and generally useful, I translate
+forthwith:--
+
+"I understand, my dear, that one is vexed to take so much trouble without
+learning the names of the plants one examines; but I confess to you in good
+faith that it never entered into my plan to spare you this little chagrin.
+One pretends that Botany is nothing but a science of words, which only
+exercises the memory, and only teaches how to give plants names. For me, I
+know _no_ rational study which is only a science of words: and to which of
+the two, I pray you, shall I grant the name of botanist,--to him who knows
+how to spit out a name or a phrase at the sight of a plant, without knowing
+anything of its structure, or to him who, knowing that structure very well,
+is ignorant nevertheless of the very arbitrary name that one gives to the
+plant in such and such a country? If we only gave to your children an
+amusing occupation, we should miss the best half of our purpose, which is,
+in amusing them, to exercise their intelligence and accustom them to
+attention. Before teaching them to name what they see, let us begin by
+teaching them to see it. _That_ science, forgotten in all educations, ought
+to form the most important part of theirs. I can never repeat it often
+enough--teach them never to be satisfied with words, ('se payer de mots')
+and to hold themselves as knowing nothing of what has reached no farther
+than their memories."
+
+8. Rousseau chooses, to represent his 'Personees,' La Mufflaude, la
+Linaire, l'Euphraise, la Pediculaire, la Crête-de-coq, l'Orobanche, la
+Cimbalaire, la Velvote, la Digitale, giving plates of snapdragon, foxglove,
+and Madonna-herb, (the Cimbalaire), and therefore including my entire class
+of Draconidæ, whether open or close throated. But I propose myself to
+separate from them the flower which, for the present, I have called
+Monacha, but may perhaps find hereafter a better name; this one, which is
+the best Latin I can find for a nun of the desert, being given to it
+because all the resemblance either to calf or dragon has ceased in its rosy
+petals, and they resemble--the lower ones those of the mountain thyme, and
+the upper one a softly crimson cowl or hood.
+
+9. This beautiful mountain flower, at present, by the good grace of
+botanists, known as Pedicularis, from a disease which it is supposed to
+give to sheep, is distinguished from all other Draconidæ by its beautifully
+divided leaves: while the flower itself, like, as aforesaid, thyme in the
+three lower petals, rises in the upper one quite upright, and terminates in
+the narrow and peculiar hood from which I have named it 'Monacha.'
+
+10. Two deeper crimson spots with white centres animate the colour of the
+lower petals in our mountain kind---mountain or morass;--it is vilely drawn
+in S. 997 under the name of Sylvatica, translated 'Procumbent'! As it is
+neither a wood flower nor a procumbent one,[33] and as its rosy colour is
+rare among morass flowers, I shall call it simply Monacha Rosea.
+
+I have not the smallest notion of the meaning of the following sentence in
+S.:--"Upper lip of corolla not rostrate, with the margin on each side
+furnished with a triangular tooth immediately below the apex, but without
+any tooth below the middle." Why, or when, a lip is rostrate, or has any
+'tooth below the middle,' I do not know; but the upper _petal_ of the
+corolla is here a very close gathered hood, with the style emergent
+downwards, and the stamens all hidden and close set within.
+
+In this action of the upper petal, and curve of the style, the flower
+resembles the Labiates,[34] and is the proper link between them and the
+Draconidæ. The capsule is said by S. to be oval-ovoid. As eggs always _are_
+oval, I don't feel farther informed by the epithet. The capsule and seed
+both are of entirely indescribable shapes, with any number of sides--very
+foxglove-like, and inordinately large. The seeds of the entire family are
+'ovoid-subtrigonous.'--S.
+
+11. I find only two species given as British by S., namely, Sylvatica and
+Palustris; but I take first for the Regina, the beautiful Arctic species D.
+1105, Flora Suecica, 555. Rose-coloured in the stem, pale pink in the
+flowers (corollæ pallide incarnatæ), the calices furry against the cold,
+whence the present ugly name, Hirsuta. Only on the highest crests of the
+Lapland Alps.
+
+(2) Rosea, D. 225, there called Sylvatica, as by S., presumably because "in
+pascuis subhumidis non raræ." Beautifully drawn, but, as I have described
+it, vigorously erect, and with no decumbency whatever in any part of it.
+Root branched, and enormous in proportion to plant, and I fancy therefore
+must be good for something if one knew it. But Gerarde, who calls the plant
+Red Rattle, (it having indeed much in common with the Yellow Rattle), says,
+"It groweth in moist and moorish meadows; the herbe is not only
+unprofitable, but likewise hurtful, and an infirmity of the meadows."
+
+(3) Palustris, D. 2055, S. 996--scarcely any likeness between the plates.
+"Everywhere in the meadows," according to D. I leave the English name,
+Marsh Monacha, much doubting its being more marshy than others.
+
+12. I take next (4 and 5) two northern species, Lapponica, D. 2, and
+Grönlandica, D. 1166; the first yellow, the second red, both beautiful. The
+Lap one has its divided leaves almost united into one lovely spear-shaped,
+single leaf. The Greenland one has its red hood much prolonged in front.
+
+(6) Ramosa, also a Greenland species; yellow, very delicate and beautiful.
+Three stems from one root, but may be more or fewer, I suppose.
+
+13. (7) Norvegica, a beautifully clustered golden flower, with thick stem.
+D. 30, the only locality given being the Dovrefeldt. "Alpina" and "Flammea"
+are the synonyms, but I do not know it on the Alps, and it is no more
+flame-coloured than a cowslip.
+
+Both the Lapland and Norwegian flowers are drawn with their stems wavy,
+though upright--a rare and pretty habit of growth.
+
+14. (8) Suecica, D. 26, named awkwardly Sceptrum Carolinum, in honour of
+Charles XII. It is the largest of all the species drawn in D., and
+contrasts strikingly with (4) and (5) in the strict uprightness of its
+stem. The corolla is closed at the extremity, which is red; the body of the
+flower pale yellow. Grows in marshy and shady woods, near Upsal. Linn.,
+Flora Suecica, 553.
+
+The many-lobed but united leaves, at the root five or six inches long, are
+irregularly beautiful.
+
+15. These eight species are all I can specify, having no pictures of the
+others named by Loudon,--eleven, making nineteen altogether, and I wish I
+could find a twentieth and draw them all, but the reader may be well
+satisfied if he clearly know these eight. The group they form is an
+entirely distinct one, exactly intermediate between the Vestals and
+Draconids, and cannot be rightly attached to either; for it is Draconid in
+structure and affinity--Vestal in form--and I don't see how to get the
+connection of the three families rightly expressed without taking the
+Draconidæ out of the groups belonging to the dark Kora, and placing them
+next the Vestals, with the Monachæ between; for indeed Linaria and several
+other Draconid forms are entirely innocent and beautiful, and even the
+Foxglove never does any real mischief like hemlock, while decoratively it
+is one of the most precious of mountain flowers. I find myself also
+embarrassed by my name of Vestals, because of the masculine groups of Basil
+and Thymus, and I think it will be better to call them simply Menthæ, and
+to place them with the other cottage-garden plants not yet classed, taking
+the easily remembered names Mentha, Monacha, Draconida. This will leave me
+a blank seventh place among my twelve orders at p. 194, vol. i., which I
+think I shall fill by taking cyclamen and anagillis out of the Primulaceæ,
+and making a separate group of them. These retouchings and changes are
+inevitable in a work confessedly tentative and suggestive only; but in
+whatever state of imperfection I may be forced to leave 'Proserpina,' it
+will assuredly be found, up to the point reached, a better foundation for
+the knowledge of flowers in the minds of young people than any hitherto
+adopted system of nomenclature.
+
+16. Taking then this re-arranged group, Mentha, Monacha, and Draconida, as
+a sufficiently natural and convenient one, I will briefly give the
+essentially botanical relations of the three families.
+
+Mentha and Monacha agree in being essentially hooded flowers, the upper
+petal more or less taking the form of a cup, helmet or hood, which conceals
+the tops of the stamens. Of the three lower petals, the lowest is almost
+invariably the longest; it sometimes is itself divided again into two, but
+may be best thought of as single, and with the two lateral ones,
+distinguished in the Menthæ as the apron and the side pockets.
+
+Plate XII. represents the most characteristic types of the blossoms of
+Menthæ, in the profile and front views, all a little magnified. The upper
+two are white basil, purple spotted--growing here at Brantwood always with
+two terminal flowers. The two middle figures are the purple-spotted dead
+nettle, Lamium maculatum; and the two lower, thyme: but I have not been
+able to draw these as I wanted, the perspectives of the petals being too
+difficult, and inexplicable to the eye even in the flowers themselves
+without continually putting them in changed positions.
+
+17. The Menthæ are in their structure essentially quadrate plants; their
+stems are square, their leaves opposite, their stamens either four or two,
+their seeds two-carpeled. But their calices are five-sepaled, falling into
+divisions of two and three; and the flowers, though essentially
+four-petaled, may divide either the upper or lower petal, or both, into two
+lobes, and so present a six-lobed outline. The entire plants, but chiefly
+the leaves, are nearly always fragrant, and always innocent. None of them
+sting, none prick, and none poison.
+
+18. The Draconids, easily recognizable by their aspect, are botanically
+indefinable with any clearness or simplicity. The calyx may be five- or
+four-sepaled; the corolla, five- or four-lobed; the stamens may be two,
+four, four with a rudimentary fifth, or five with the two anterior ones
+longer than the other three! The capsule may open by two, three, or four
+valves,--or by pores; the seeds, generally numerous, are sometimes
+solitary, and the leaves may be alternate, opposite, or verticillate.
+
+19. Thus licentious in structure, they are also doubtful in disposition.
+None that I know of are fragrant, few useful, many more or less malignant,
+and some parasitic. The following piece of a friend's letter almost makes
+me regret my rescue of them from the dark kingdom of Kora:--
+
+    "... And I find that the Monacha Rosea (Red Rattle is its name, besides
+    the ugly one) is a perennial, and several of the other draconidæ,
+    foxglove, etc., are biennials, born this year, flowering and dying next
+    year, and the size of roots is generally proportioned to the life of
+    plants; except when artificial cultivation develops the root specially,
+    as in turnips, etc. Several of the Draconidæ are parasites, and suck
+    the roots of other plants, and have only just enough of their own to
+    catch with. The Yellow Rattle is one; it clings to the roots of the
+    grasses and clovers, and no cultivation will make it thrive without
+    them. My authority for this last fact is Grant Allen; but I have
+    observed for myself that the Yellow Rattle has very small _white_
+    sucking roots, and no earth sticking to them. The toothworts and broom
+    rapes are Draconidæ, I think, and wholly parasites. Can it be that the
+    Red Rattle is the one member of the family that has 'proper pride, and
+    is self supporting'? the others are mendicant orders. We had what we
+    choose to call the Dorcas flower show yesterday, and we gave, as usual,
+    prizes for wild flower bouquets. I tried to find out the local names of
+    several flowers, but they all seemed to be called 'I don't know,
+    ma'am.' I would not allow this name to suffice for the red poppy, and I
+    said 'This red flower _must_ be called _something_--tell me what you
+    call it?' A few of the audience answered 'Blind Eyes.' Is it because
+    they have to do with sleep that they are called Blind Eyes--or because
+    they are dazzling?"
+
+20. I think, certainly, from the dazzling, which sometimes with the poppy,
+scarlet geranium, and nasturtium, is more distinctly oppressive to the eye
+than a real excess of light.
+
+I will certainly not include among my rescued Draconidæ, the parasitic
+Lathræa and Orobanche; and cannot yet make certain of any minor
+classification among those which I retain,--but, uniting Bartsia with
+Euphrasia, I shall have, in the main, the three divisions Digitalis,
+Linaria, Euphrasia, and probably separate the moneyworts as links with
+Veronica, and Rhinanthus as links with Lathræa.
+
+And as I shall certainly be unable this summer, under the pressure of
+resumed work at Oxford, to spend time in any new botanical investigations,
+I will rather try to fulfil the promise given in the last number, to
+collect what little I have been able hitherto to describe or ascertain,
+respecting the higher modes of tree structure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+SCIENCE IN HER CELLS.
+
+    [The following chapter has been written six years. It was delayed in
+    order to complete the promised clearer analysis of stem-structure;
+    which, after a great deal of chopping, chipping, and peeling of my oaks
+    and birches, came to reverently hopeless pause. What is here done may
+    yet have some use in pointing out to younger students how they may
+    simplify their language, and direct their thoughts, so as to attain, in
+    due time, to reverent hope.]
+
+1. The most generally useful book, to myself, hitherto, in such little time
+as I have for reading about plants, has been Lindley's 'Ladies' Botany';
+but the most rich and true I have yet found in illustration, the 'Histoire
+des Plantes,'[35] by Louis Figuier. I should like those of my readers who
+can afford it to buy both these books; the first named, at any rate, as I
+shall always refer to it for structural drawings, and on points of doubtful
+classification; while the second contains much general knowledge, expressed
+with some really human intelligence and feeling; besides some good and
+singularly _just_ history of botanical discovery and the men who guided it.
+The botanists, indeed, tell me proudly, "Figuier is no authority." But who
+wants authority! Is there nothing known yet about plants, then, which can
+be taught to a boy or girl, without referring them to an 'authority'?
+
+I, for my own part, care only to gather what Figuier can teach concerning
+things visible, to any boy or girl, who live within reach of a bramble
+hedge, or a hawthorn thicket, and can find authority enough for what they
+are told, in the sticks of them.
+
+2. If only _he_ would, or could, tell us clearly that much; but like other
+doctors, though with better meaning than most, he has learned mainly to
+look at things with a microscope,--rarely with his eyes. And I am sorry to
+see, on re-reading this chapter of my own, which is little more than an
+endeavour to analyze and arrange the statements contained in his second,
+that I have done it more petulantly and unkindly than I ought; but I can't
+do all the work over again, now,--more's the pity. I have not looked at
+this chapter for a year, and shall be sixty before I know where I am;--(I
+find myself, instead, now, sixty-four!)
+
+3. But I stand at once partly corrected in this second chapter of
+Figuier's, on the 'Tige,' French from the Latin 'Tignum,' which
+'authorities' say is again from the Sanscrit, and means 'the thing hewn
+with an axe'; anyhow it is modern French for what we are to call the stem
+(§ 12, p. 136).
+
+"The tige," then, begins M. Louis, "is the axis of the ascending system of
+a vegetable, and it is garnished at intervals with vital knots, (eyes,)
+from which spring leaves and buds, disposed in a perfectly regular order.
+The root presents nothing of the kind. This character permits us always to
+distinguish, in the vegetable axis, what belongs really to the stem, and
+what to the root."
+
+4. Yes; and that is partly a new idea to me, for in this power of
+_assigning their order_ for the leaves, the stem seems to take a royal or
+commandant character, and cannot be merely defined as the connexion of the
+leaf with the roots.
+
+In _it_ is put the spirit of determination. One cannot fancy the little
+leaf, as it is born, determining the point it will be born at: the
+governing stem must determine that for it. Also the disorderliness of the
+root is to be noted for a condition of its degradation, no less than its
+love, and need, of Darkness.
+
+Nor was I quite right (above, § 15, p. 139) in calling the stem _itself_
+'spiral': it is itself a straight-growing rod, but one which, as it grows,
+lays the buds of future leaves round it in a spiral order, like the
+bas-relief on Trajan's column.
+
+I go on with Figuier: the next passage is very valuable.
+
+5. "The tige is the part of plants which, directed into the air, supports,
+and _gives growing power to_, the branches, the twigs, the leaves, and the
+flowers. The form, strength, and direction of the tige depend on the part
+that each plant has to play among the vast vegetable population of our
+globe. Plants which need for their life a pure and often-renewed air, are
+borne by a straight tige, robust and tall. When they have need only of a
+moist air, more condensed, and more rarely renewed, when they have to creep
+on the ground or glide in thickets, the tiges are long, flexible, and
+dragging. If they are to float in the air, sustaining themselves on more
+robust vegetables, they are provided with flexible, slender, and supple
+tiges."
+
+6. Yes; but in that last sentence he loses hold of his main idea, and to me
+the important one,--namely, the connexion of the form of stem with the
+quality of the air it requires. And that idea itself is at present vague,
+though most valuable, to me. A strawberry creeps, with a flexible stem, but
+requires certainly no less pure air than a wood-fungus, which stands up
+straight. And in our own hedges and woods, are the wild rose and
+honeysuckle signs of unwholesome air?
+
+  "And honeysuckle loved to crawl
+  Up the lone crags and ruined wall.
+  I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade
+  The sun in all his round surveyed."
+
+It seems to me, in the nooks most haunted by honeysuckle in my own wood,
+that the reason for its twining is a very feminine one,--that it likes to
+twine; and that all these whys and wherefores resolve themselves at last
+into--what a modern philosopher, of course, cannot understand--caprice.[36]
+
+7. Farther on, Figuier, quoting St. Hilaire, tells us, of the creepers in
+primitive forests,--"Some of them resemble waving ribands, others coil
+themselves and describe vast spirals; they droop in festoons, they wind
+hither and thither among the trees, they fling themselves from one to
+another, and form masses of leaves and flowers in which the observer is
+often at a loss to discover on which plant each several blossom grows."
+
+For all this, the real reasons will be known only when human beings become
+reasonable. For, except a curious naturalist or wistful missionary, no
+Christian has trodden the labyrinths of delight and decay among these
+garlands, but men who had no other thought than how to cheat their savage
+people out of their gold, and give them gin and smallpox in exchange. But,
+so soon as true servants of Heaven shall enter these Edens, and the Spirit
+of God enter with them, another spirit will also be breathed into the
+physical air; and the stinging insect, and venomous snake, and poisonous
+tree, pass away before the power of the regenerate human soul.
+
+8. At length, on the structure of the tige, Figuier begins his real work,
+thus:---
+
+"A glance of the eye, thrown on the section of a log of wood destined for
+warming, permits us to recognize that the tige of the trees of our forests
+presents three essential parts, which are, in going from within to without,
+the pith, the wood, and the bark. The pith, (in French, marrow,) forms a
+sort of column in the centre of the woody axis. In very thick and old stems
+its diameter appears very little; and it has even for a long time been
+supposed that the marrow ends by disappearing altogether from the stems of
+old trees. But it does nothing of the sort;[37] and it is now ascertained,
+by exact measures, that its diameter remains sensibly invariable[38] from
+the moment when the young woody axis begins to consolidate itself, to the
+epoch of its most complete development."
+
+So far, so good; but what does he mean by the complete development of the
+young _woody_ axis? When does the axis become 'wooden,' and how far up the
+tree does he call it an axis? If the stem divides into three branches,
+which is the axis? And is the pith in the trunk no thicker than in each
+branch?
+
+9. He proceeds to tell us, "The marrow is formed by a reunion of
+cells."--Yes, and so is Newgate, and so was the Bastille. But what does it
+matter whether the marrow is made of a reunion of cells, or cellars, or
+walls, or floors, or ceilings? I want to know what's the use of it? why
+doesn't it grow bigger with the rest of the tree? when _does_ the tree
+'consolidate itself'? when is it finally consolidated? and how can there be
+always marrow in it when the weary frame of its age remains a mere scarred
+tower of war with the elements, full of dust and bats?
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 24.]
+
+'He will tell you if only you go on patiently,' thinks the reader. He will
+not! Once your modern botanist gets into cells, he stays in them. Hear how
+he goes on!--"This cell is a sort of sack; this sack is completely closed;
+sometimes it is empty, sometimes it"--is full?--no, that would be
+unscientific simplicity: sometimes it "conceals a matter in its interior."
+"The marrow of young trees, such as it is represented in Figure 24
+(Figuier, Figs. 38, 39, p. 42), is nothing else"--(indeed!)--"than an
+aggregation of cells, which, first of spherical form, have become
+polyhedric by their increase and mutual compression."
+
+10. Now these figures, 38 and 39, which profess to represent this change,
+show us sixteen oval cells, such as at A, (Fig. 24) enlarged into thirteen
+larger, and flattish, hexagons!--B, placed at a totally different angle.
+
+And before I can give you the figure revised with any available accuracy, I
+must know why or how the cells are enlarged, and in what direction.
+
+Do their walls lengthen laterally when they are empty, or does the
+'matière' inside stuff them more out, (itself increased from what sources?)
+when they are full? In either case, during this change from circle to
+hexagon, is the marrow getting thicker without getting longer? If so, the
+change in the angle of the cells is intentional, and probably is so; but
+the number of cells should have been the same: and further, the term
+'hexagonal' can only be applied to the _section_ of a tubular cell, as in
+honeycomb, so that the floor and ceiling of our pith cell are left
+undescribed.
+
+11. Having got thus much of (partly conjectural) idea of the mechanical
+structure of marrow, here follows the solitary vital, or mortal, fact in
+the whole business, given in one crushing sentence at the close:---
+
+"The medullary tissue" (first time of using this fine phrase for the
+marrow,--why can't he say marrowy tissue--'tissue moelleuse'?) "appears
+very early struck with atony," ('atonic,' want of tone,) "above all, in its
+central parts." And so ends all he has to say for the present about the
+marrow! and it never appears to occur to him for a moment, that if indeed
+the noblest trees live all their lives in a state of healthy and robust
+paralysis, it is a distinction, hitherto unheard of, between vegetables and
+animals!
+
+12. Two pages farther on, however, (p. 45,) we get more about the marrow,
+and of great interest,--to this effect, for I must abstract and complete
+here, instead of translating.
+
+"The marrow itself is surrounded, as the centre of an electric cable is, by
+its guarding threads--that is to say, by a number of cords or threads
+coming between it and the wood, and differing from all others in the tree.
+
+"The entire protecting cylinder composed of them has been called the
+'étui,' (or needle-case,) of the marrow. But each of the cords which
+together form this étui, is itself composed of an almost infinitely
+delicate thread twisted into a screw, like the common spring of a
+letter-weigher or a Jack-in-the-box, but of exquisite fineness." Upon this,
+two pages and an elaborate figure are given to these 'trachées'--tracheas,
+the French call them,--and we are never told the measure of them, either in
+diameter or length,[39] and still less, the use of them!
+
+I collect, however, in my thoughts, what I have learned thus far.
+
+13. A tree stem, it seems, is a growing thing, cracked outside, because its
+skin won't stretch, paralysed inside, because its marrow won't grow, but
+which continues the process of its life somehow, by knitted nerves without
+any nervous energy in them, protected by spiral springs without any spring
+in them.
+
+Stay--I am going too fast. That coiling is perhaps prepared for some kind
+of uncoiling; and I will try if I can't learn something about it from some
+other book--noticing, as I pause to think where to look, the advantage of
+our English tongue in its pithy Saxon word, 'pith,' separating all our
+ideas of vegetable structure clearly from animal; while the poor Latin and
+French must use the entirely inaccurate words 'medulla' and 'moelle'; all,
+however, concurring in their recognition of a vital power of some essential
+kind in this white cord of cells: "Medulla, sive illa vitalis anima est,
+ante se tendit, longitudinem impellens." (Pliny, 'Of the Vine,' liber X.,
+cap. xxi.) 'Vitalis anima'--yes--_that_ I accept; but 'longitudinem
+impellens,' I pause at; being not at all clear, yet, myself, about any
+impulsive power in the pith.[40]
+
+14. However, I take up first, and with best hope, Dr. Asa Gray, who tells
+me (Art. 211) that pith consists of parenchyma, 'which is at first gorged
+with sap,' but that many stems expand so rapidly that their pith is torn
+into a mere lining or into horizontal plates; and that as the stem grows
+older, the pith becomes dry and light, and is 'then of no farther use to
+the plant.' But of what use it ever was, we are not informed; and the
+Doctor makes us his bow, so far as the professed article on pith goes; but,
+farther on, I find in his account of 'Sap-wood,' (Art. 224.) that in the
+germinating plantlet, the sap 'ascends first through the parenchyma,
+especially through its central portion or pith.' Whereby we are led back to
+our old question, what sap is, and where it comes from, with the now
+superadded question, whether the young pith is a mere succulent sponge, or
+an active power, and constructive mechanism, nourished by the abundant sap:
+as Columella has it,--
+
+"Naturali enim spiritu omne alimentum virentis quasi quædam anima, per
+_medullam_ trunci veluti per siphonem, trahitur in summum."[41]
+
+As none of these authors make any mention of a _communication_ between the
+cells of the pith, I conclude that the sap they are filled with is taken up
+by them, and used to construct their own thickening tissue.
+
+15. Next, I take Balfour's 'Structural Botany,' and by his index, under the
+word 'Pith,' am referred to his articles 8, 72, and 75. In article 8,
+neither the word pith, nor any expression alluding to it, occurs.
+
+In article 72, the stem of an outlaid tree is defined as consisting of
+'pith, fibro-vascular and [42] woody tissue, medullary rays, bark, and
+epidermis.'
+
+A more detailed statement follows, illustrated by a figure surrounded by
+twenty-three letters--namely, two _b_ s, three _c_ s, four _e_ s, three _f_
+s, one _l_, four _m_ s, three _p_ s, one _r_, and two _v_ s.
+
+Eighteen or twenty minute sputters of dots may, with a good lens, be
+discerned to proceed from this alphabet, and to stop at various points, or
+lose themselves in the texture, of the represented wood. And, knowing now
+something of the matter beforehand, guessing a little more, and gleaning
+the rest with my finest glass, I achieve the elucidation of the figure, to
+the following extent, explicable without letters at all, by my more simple
+drawing, Figure 25.
+
+16. (1) The inner circle full of little cells, diminishing in size towards
+the outside, represents the pith, 'very large at this period of the
+growth'--(the first year, we are told in next page,) and 'very large'--he
+means in proportion to the rest of the branch. _How_ large he does not say,
+in his text, but states, in his note, that the figure is magnified 26
+diameters. I have drawn mine by the more convenient multiplier of 30, and
+given the real size at B, _according to Balfour_:--but without believing
+him to be right. I never saw a maple stem of the first year so small.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 25.]
+
+(2) The black band with white dots round the marrow, represents the
+marrow-sheath.
+
+(3) From the marrow-sheath run the marrow-rays 'dividing the vascular
+circle into numerous compact segments.' A 'ray' cannot divide anything into
+a segment. Only a partition, or a knife, can do that. But we shall find
+presently that marrow _rays_ ought to be called marrow-_plates_, and are
+really mural, forming more or less continuous partitions.
+
+(4) The compact segments 'consist of woody vessels and of porous vessels.'
+This is the first we have heard of woody _vessels_! He means the '_fibres_
+ligneux' of Figuier; and represents them in each compartment, as at C (Fig.
+25). without telling us why he draws the woody vessels as radiating. They
+appear to radiate, indeed, when wood is sawn across, but they are really
+upright.
+
+(5) A moist layer of greenish cellular tissue called the cambium
+layer--black in Figure 25--and he draws it in flat arches, without saying
+why.
+
+(6), (7), (8) Three layers of bark (called in his note Endophloeum;
+Mesophloeum, and Epiphloeum!) with 'laticiferous vessels.' [43]
+
+(9) Epidermis. The three layers of bark being separated by single lines, I
+indicate the epidermis by a double one, with a rough fringe outside, and
+thus we have the parts of the section clearly visible and distinct for
+discussion, so far as this first figure goes,--without wanting one letter
+of all his three and twenty!
+
+17. But on the next page, this ingenious author gives us a new figure,
+which professes to represent the same order of things in a longitudinal
+section; and in retracing that order sideways, instead of looking down, he
+not only introduces new terms, but misses one of his old layers in doing
+so,--thus:
+
+His order, in explaining Figure 96, contains, as above, nine members of the
+tree stem.
+
+But his order, in explaining Figure 97, contains only eight, thus:
+
+(1) The pith. (2) Medullary sheath. Circles.
+
+(3) Medullary ray = a Radius.
+
+(4) Vascular zone, with woody _fibres_ (not now vessels!) The fibres are
+composed of spiral, annular, pitted, and other vessels.
+
+(5) Inner bark or 'liber,' with layer of cambium cells.
+
+(6) Second layer of bark, or 'cellular envelope,' with laticiferous
+vessels.
+
+(7) Outer or tuberous layer of bark.
+
+(8) Epidermis.
+
+Doing the best I can to get at the muddle-headed gentleman's meaning, it
+appears, by the lettering of his Figure 97, my 25 above, that the 'liber,'
+number 5, contains the cambium layer in the middle of it. The part of the
+liber between the cambium and the wood is not marked in Figure 96;--but the
+cambium is number 5, and the liber outside of it is number 6,--the
+Endophloeum of his note.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 26.]
+
+Having got himself into this piece of lovely confusion, he proceeds to give
+a figure of the wood in the second year, which I think he has borrowed,
+without acknowledgment, from Figuier, omitting a piece of Figuier's woodcut
+which is unexplained in Figuier's text. I will spare my readers the work I
+have had to do, in order to get the statements on either side clarified:
+but I think they will find, if they care to work through the wilderness of
+the two authors' wits, that this which follows is the sum of what they have
+effectively to tell us; with the collated list of the main questions they
+leave unanswered--and, worse, unasked.
+
+18. An ordinary tree branch, in transverse section, consists essentially of
+three parts only,--the Pith, Wood, and Bark.
+
+The pith is in full animation during the first year--that is to say, during
+the actual shooting of the wood. We are left to infer that in the second
+year, the pith of the then unprogressive shoot becomes collective only, not
+formative; and that the pith of the new shoot virtually energizes the new
+wood in its deposition beside the old one. Thus, let _a b_, Figure 26, be a
+shoot of the first year, and _b c_ of the second. The pith remains of the
+same thickness in both, but that of the new shoot is, I suppose, chiefly
+active in sending down the new wood to thicken the old one, which is
+collected, however, and fastened by the extending pith-rays below. You see,
+I have given each shoot four fibres of wood for its own; then the four
+fibres of the upper one send out two to thicken the lower: the pith-rays,
+represented by the white transverse claws, catch and gather all together.
+Mind, I certify nothing of this to you; but if this do not happen,--let the
+botanists tell you what _does_.
+
+19. Secondly. The wood, represented by these four lines, is to be always
+remembered as consisting of fibres and vessels; therefore it is called
+'vascular,' a word which you may as well remember (though rarely needed in
+familiar English), with its roots, _vas_, a vase, and _vasculum_, a little
+vase or phial. 'Vascule' may sometimes be allowed in botanical descriptions
+where 'cell' is not clear enough; thus, at present, we find our botanists
+calling the pith 'cellular' but the wood 'vascular,' with, I think, the
+implied meaning that a 'vascule,' little or large, is a long thing, and has
+some liquid in it, while a 'cell' is a more or less round thing, and to be
+supposed empty, unless described as full. But what liquid fills the
+vascules of the wood, they do not tell us.[44] I assume that they absorb
+water, as long as the tree lives.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 27.]
+
+20. Wood, whether vascular or fibrous, is however formed, in outlaid
+plants, first outside of the pith, and then, in shoots of the second year,
+outside of the wood of the first, and in the third year, outside of the
+wood of the second; so that supposing the quantity of wood sent down from
+the growing shoot distributed on a flat plane, the structure in the third
+year would be as in Figure 27. But since the new wood is distributed all
+round the stem, (in successive cords or threads, if not at once), the
+increase of substance after a year or two would be untraceable, unless more
+shoots than one were formed at the extremity of the branch. Of actual bud
+and branch structure, I gave introductory account long since in the fifth
+volume of 'Modern Painters.'[45] to which I would now refer the reader; but
+both then, and to-day, after twenty years' further time allowed me, I am
+unable to give the least explanation of the mode in which the wood is
+really added to the interior stem. I cannot find, even, whether this is
+mainly done in springtime, or in the summer and autumn, when the young
+suckers form on the wood; but my impression is that though all the several
+substances are added annually, a little more pith going to the edges of the
+pith-plates, and a little more bark to the bark, with a great deal more
+wood to the wood,--there is a different or at least successive period for
+each deposit, the carrying all these elements to their places involving a
+fineness of basket work or web work in the vessels, which neither
+microscope nor dissecting tool can disentangle. The result on the whole,
+however, is practically that we have, outside the wood, always a mysterious
+'cambium layer,' and then some distinctions in the bark itself, of which we
+must take separate notice.
+
+21. Of Cambium, Dr. Gray's 220th article gives the following account. "It
+is not a distinct substance, but a layer of delicate new cells full of sap.
+The inner portion of the cambium layer is, therefore, nascent wood, and the
+outer nascent bark. As the cells of this layer multiply, the greater number
+lengthen vertically into _prosenchyma_, or woody tissue, while some are
+transformed into ducts" (wood vessels?) "and others remaining as
+_parenchyma_, continue the medullary rays, or commence new ones." Nothing
+is said here of the part of the cambium which becomes bark: but at page
+128, the thin walled cells of the bark are said to be those of ordinary
+'parenchyma,' and in the next page a very important passage occurs, which
+must have a paragraph to itself. I close the present one with one more
+protest against the entirely absurd terms 'par-enchyma,' for common
+cellular tissue, 'pros-enchyma,' for cellular tissue with longer
+cells;--'cambium' for an early state of _both_, and 'diachyma' for a
+peculiar position of _one_![46] while the chemistry of all these substances
+is wholly neglected, and we have no idea given us of any difference in
+pith, wood, and bark, than that they are made of short or long--young or
+old--cells!
+
+22. But in Dr. Gray's 230th article comes this passage of real value.
+(Italics mine--all.) "While the newer layers of the wood abound in _crude_
+sap, which they convey to the leaves, those of the inner bark abound in
+_elaborated_ sap, which _they receive from the leaves_, and convey to the
+_cambium_ layer, or _zone of growth_. The proper juices and peculiar
+products of plants are accordingly found in the foliage and bark,
+especially the latter. In the bark, therefore, either of the stem or root,
+medicinal and other principles are usually to be sought, rather than in the
+wood. Nevertheless, as the wood is kept in connection with the bark by the
+medullary rays, many products which probably originate in the former are
+deposited in the wood."
+
+23. Now, at last, I see my way to useful summary of the whole, which I had
+better give in a separate chapter: and will try in future to do the
+preliminary work of elaboration of the sap from my authorities, above
+shown, in its process, to the reader, without making so much fuss about it.
+But, I think in this case, it was desirable that the floods of pros-, par-,
+peri-, dia-, and circumlocution, through which one has to wade towards any
+emergent crag of fact in modern scientific books, should for once be seen
+in the wasteful tide of them; that so I might finally pray the younger
+students who feel, or remember, their disastrous sway, to cure themselves
+for ever of the fatal habit of imagining that they know more of anything
+after naming it unintelligibly, and thinking about it impudently, than they
+did by loving sight of its nameless being, and in wise confession of its
+boundless mystery.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In re-reading the text of this number I can secure my young readers of some
+things left doubtful, as, for instance, in their acceptance of the word
+'Monacha,' for the flower described in the sixth chapter. I have used it
+now habitually too long to part with it myself, and I think it will be
+found serviceable and pleasurable by others. Neither shall I now change the
+position of the Draconidae, as suggested at p. 118, but keep all as first
+planned. See among other reasons for doing so the letter quoted in p. 121.
+
+I also add to the plate originally prepared for this number, one showing
+the effect of Veronica officinalis in decoration of foreground, merely by
+its green leaves; see the paragraphs 1 and 5 of Chapter VI. I have not
+represented the fine serration of the leaves, as they are quite invisible
+from standing height: the book should be laid on the floor and looked down
+on, without stooping, to see the effect intended. And so I gladly close
+this long-lagging number, hoping never to write such a tiresome chapter as
+this again, or to make so long a pause between any readable one and its
+sequence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] Vol. i., p. 212, note.
+
+[2] See 'Deucalion,' vol. ii., chap, i., p. 12, § 18.
+
+[3] I am ashamed to give so rude outlines; but every moment now is valuable
+to me: careful outline of a dog-violet is given in Plate X.
+
+[4] A careless bit of Byron's, (the last song but one in the 'Deformed
+Transformed'); but Byron's most careless work is better, by its innate
+energy, than other people's most laboured. I suppress, in some doubts about
+my 'digamma,' notes on the Greek violet and the Ion of Euripides;--which
+the reader will perhaps be good enough to fancy a serious loss to him, and
+supply for himself.
+
+[5] Nine; I see that I missed count of P. farinosa, the most abundant of
+all.
+
+[6] "A feeble little quatrefoil--growing one on the stem, like a Parnassia,
+and looking like a Parnassia that had dropped a leaf. I think it drops one
+of its own four, mostly, and lives as three-fourths of itself, for most of
+its time. Stamens pale gold. Root-leaves, three or four, grass-like;
+growing among the moist moss chiefly."
+
+[7] The great work of Lecoq, 'Geographic Botanique,' is of priceless value;
+but treats all on too vast a scale for our purposes.
+
+[8] It is, I believe, Sowerby's Viola Lutea, 721 of the old edition, there
+painted with purple upper petals; but he says in the text, "Petals either
+all yellow, or the two uppermost are of a blue purple, the rest yellow with
+a blue tinge: very often the whole are purple."
+
+[9] Did the wretch never hear bees in a lime tree then, or ever see one on
+a star gentian?
+
+[10] Septuagint, "the eyes of doves out of thy silence." Vulgate, "the eyes
+of doves, besides that which is hidden in them." Meaning--the _dim_ look of
+love, beyond all others in sweetness.
+
+[11] When I have the chance, and the time, to submit the proofs of
+'Proserpina' to friends who know more of Botany than I, or have kindness
+enough to ascertain debateable things for me, I mean in future to do
+so,--using the letter A to signify Amicus, generally; with acknowledgment
+by name, when it is permitted, of especial help or correction. Note first
+of this kind: I find here on this word, 'five-petaled,' as applied to
+Pinguicula, "Qy. two-lipped? it is monopetalous, and monosepalous, the
+calyx and corolla being each all in one piece."
+
+Yes; and I am glad to have the observation inserted. But my term,
+'five-petaled,' must stand. For the question with me is always first, not
+how the petals are connected, but how many they are. Also I have accepted
+the term petal--but never the word lip--as applied to flowers. The generic
+term 'Labiatæ' is cancelled in 'Proserpina,' 'Vestales' being substituted;
+and these flowers, when I come to examine them, are to be described, not as
+divided into two lips, but into hood, apron, and side-pockets. Farther, the
+depth to which either calyx or corolla is divided, and the firmness with
+which the petals are attached to the torus, may, indeed, often be an
+important part of the plant's description, but ought not to be elements in
+its definition. Three petaled and three-sepaled, four-petaled and
+four-sepaled, five-petaled and five-sepaled, etc., etc., are
+essential--with me, primal--elements of definition; next, whether resolute
+or stellar in their connection; next, whether round or pointed, etc. Fancy,
+for instance, the fatality to a rose of pointing its petals, and to a lily,
+of rounding them! But how deep cut, or how hard holding, is quite a minor
+question.
+
+Farther, that all plants _are_ petaled and sepaled, and never mere cups in
+saucers, is a great fact, not to be dwelt on in a note.
+
+[12] Our 'Lucia Nivea,' 'Blanche Lucy;' in present botany, Bog bean! having
+no connection whatever with any manner of bean, but only a slight
+resemblance to bean-_leaves_ in its own lower ones. Compare Ch. IV. § 11.
+
+[13] It is not. (Resolute negative from A., unsparing of time for me; and
+what a state of things it all signifies!)
+
+[14] With the following three notes, 'A' must become a definitely and
+gratefully interpreted letter. I am indebted for the first, conclusive in
+itself, but variously supported and confirmed by the two following, to R.J.
+Mann, Esq., M.D., long ago a pupil of Dr. Lindley's, and now on the council
+of Whitelands College, Chelsea:--for the second, to Mr. Thomas Moore,
+F.L.S., the kind Keeper of the Botanic Garden at Chelsea; for the third,
+which will be farther on useful to us, to Miss Kemm, the botanical lecturer
+at Whitelands.
+
+(1) There is no explanation of Lentibulariaceæ in Lindley's 'Vegetable
+Kingdom.' He was not great in that line. The term is, however, taken from
+_Lenticula_, the lentil, in allusion to the lentil-shaped air-bladders of
+the typical genus _Utricularia_.
+
+The change of the c into b may possibly have been made only from some
+euphonic fancy of the contriver of the name, who, I think, was Rich.
+
+But I somewhat incline myself to think that the _tibia_, a pipe or flute,
+may have had something to do with it. The _tibia_ may possibly have been
+diminished into a little pipe by a stretch of licence, and have become
+_tibula_: [but _tibulus_ is a kind of pine tree in Pliny]; when _Len
+tibula_ would be the lens or lentil-shaped pipe or bladder. I give you this
+only for what it is worth. The _lenticula_, as a derivation, is reliable
+and has authority.
+
+_Lenticula_, a lentil, a freckly eruption; _lenticularis_, lentil-shaped;
+so the nat. ord. ought to be (if this be right) _lenticulariaceæ_.
+
+(2) BOTANIC GARDENS, CHELSEA, _Feb._ 14, 1882.
+
+_Lentibularia_ is an old generic name of Tournefort's, which has been
+superseded by _utricularia,_ but, oddly enough, has been retained in the
+name of the order _lentibulareæ_; but it probably comes from _lenticula_,
+which signifies the little root bladders, somewhat resembling lentils.
+
+(3) 'Manual of Scientific Terms,' Stormonth, p. 234.
+_Lentibulariaceæ_, neuter, plural.
+(_Lenticula_, the shape of a lentil; from _lens_, a lentil.) The Butterwort
+family, an order of plants so named from the lenticular shape of the
+air-bladders on the branches of utricularia, one of the genera. (But
+observe that the _Butterworts_ have nothing of the sort, any of them.--R.)
+
+Loudon.--"Floaters."
+
+Lindley.--"Sometimes with whorled vesicles."
+
+In Nuttall's Standard (?) Pronouncing Dictionary, it is given,--
+_Lenticulareæ_, a nat. ord. of marsh plants, which thrive in water or
+marshes.
+
+[15] More accurately, shows the pruned roots of branches,--[Greek: epeidê
+prota tomên en horessi lelotpen]. The _pruning_ is the mythic expression of
+the subduing of passion by rectorial law.
+
+[16] The bitter sorrow with which I first recognized the extreme rarity of
+finely-developed organic sight is expressed enough in the lecture on the
+Mystery of Life, added in the large edition of 'Sesame and Lilies.'
+
+[17] Lat. acesco, to turn sour.
+
+[18] Withering quotes this as from Linnæus, and adds on authority of a Mr.
+Hawkes, "This did not succeed when tried with cows' milk." He also gives as
+another name, Yorkshire Sanicle; and says it is called _earning grass_ in
+Scotland. Linnæus says the juice will curdle reindeer's milk. The name for
+rennet is _earning_, in Lincolnshire. Withering also gives this note:
+"_Pinguis_, fat, from its effect in CONGEALING milk."--(A.) Withering of
+course wrong: the name comes, be the reader finally assured, from the
+fatness of the green leaf, quite peculiar among wild plants, and fastened
+down for us in the French word 'Grassette.' I have found the flowers also
+difficult to dry, in the benighted early times when I used to think a dried
+plant useful! See closing paragraphs of the *4th chapter.--R.
+
+[19] I find much more difficulty, myself, being old, in using my altered
+names for species than my young scholars will. In watching the bells of the
+purple bindweed fade at evening, let them learn the fourth verse of the
+prayer of Hezekiah, as it is in the Vulgate--"Generatio mea ablata est, et
+convoluta est a me, sicut tabernaculum pastoris,"--and they will not forget
+the name of the fast-fading--ever renewed--"belle d'un jour."
+
+[20] "It is Miss Cobbe, I think, who says 'all wild flowers know how to die
+gracefully.'"--A.
+
+[21] See distinction between recumbent and rampant herbs, below, under
+'Veronica Agrestis,' p. 72.
+
+[22] 'Abstracted' rather, I should have said, and with perfect skill, by
+Mr. Collingwood (the joint translator of Xenophon's Economics for the
+'Bibliotheca Pastorum'). So also the next following cut, Fig. 5.
+
+[23] Of the references, henceforward necessary to the books I have used as
+authorities, the reader will please note the following abbreviations:--
+
+    C. Curtis's Magazine of Botany.
+    D. Flora Danica.
+    F. Figuier.
+    G. Sibthorpe's Flora Græca.
+    L. Linnæus. Systema Naturæ.
+    L.S. Linnæus's Flora Suecica. But till we are quite used to the other
+    letters, I print this reference in words.
+    L.N. William Curtis's Flora Londinensis. Of the exquisite plates
+    engraved for this book by James Sowerby, note is taken in the close of
+    next chapter.
+    O. Sowerby's English Wild Flowers; the old edition in thirty-two thin
+    volumes--far the best.
+    S. Sowerby's English Wild Flowers; the modern edition in ten volumes.
+
+[24] See letter on the last results of our African campaigns, in the
+_Morning Post_ of April 14th, of this year.
+
+[25] I deliberately, not garrulously, allow more autobiography in
+'Proserpina' than is becoming, because I know not how far I may be
+permitted to carry on that which was begun in 'Fors.'
+
+[26] In present Botany, Polygala Chamæbuxus; C. 316: or, in English, Much
+Milk Ground-box. It is not, as matters usually go, a name to be ill thought
+of, as it really contains three ideas; and the plant does, without doubt,
+somewhat resemble box, and grows on the ground;--far more fitly called
+'ground-box' than the Veronica 'ground-oak.' I want to find a pretty name
+for it in connection with Savoy or Dauphine, where it indicates, as above
+stated, the _healthy_ districts of _hard_ limestone. I do not remember it
+as ever occurring among the dark and moist shales of the inner mountain
+ranges, which at once confine and pollute the air.
+
+[27] Which, with the following page, is the summary of many chapters of
+'Modern Painters:' and of the aims kept in view throughout 'Munera
+Pulveris.' The three kinds of Desert specified--of Reed, Sand, and
+Rock--should be kept in mind as exhaustively including the states of the
+earth neglected by man. For instance of a Reed desert, produced _merely_ by
+his neglect, see Sir Samuel Baker's account of the choking up of the bed of
+the White Nile. Of the sand desert, Sir F. Palgrave's journey from the
+Djowf to Hayel, vol. i., p. 92.
+
+[28] This subject is first entered on in the 'Seven Lamps,' and carried
+forward in the final chapters of 'Modern Painters,'to the point where I
+hope to take it up for conclusion, in the sections of 'Our Fathers have
+told us' devoted to the history of the fourteenth century.
+
+[29] See in the first volume, the plates of Sonchus Arvensis and Tussilago
+Petasites; in the second, Carduus tomentosus and Picris Echioides.
+
+[30] For the sense in which this word is used throughout my writings, see
+the definition of it in the 52nd paragraph of the 'Queen of the Air,'
+comparing with respect to its office in plants, §§ 59-60.
+
+[31] Written in 1880.
+
+[32] The plate of Chamædrys, D. 448, is also quite right, and not 'too tall
+and weedlike,' as I have called it at p. 72.
+
+[33] "Stems numerous from the crown of the root-stock, de-cumbent."--S. The
+effect of the flower upon the ground is always of an extremely upright and
+separate plant, never appearing in clusters, (I meant, in close masses - it
+forms exquisite little rosy crowds, on ground that it likes) or in any
+relation to a central root. My epithet 'rosea' does not deny its botanical
+de- or pro-cumbency.
+
+[34] Compare especially Galeopsis Angustifolia, D. 3031.
+
+[35] Octavo: Paris, Hachette, 1865.
+
+[36] See in the ninth chapter what I have been able, since this sentence
+was written, to notice on the matter in question.
+
+[37] I envy the French their generalized form of denial, 'Il n'en est
+rien.'
+
+[38] 'Sensiblement invariable;' 'unchanged, _so far as we can see,_' or to
+general sense; microscopic and minute change not being considered.
+
+[39] Moreover, the confusion between vertical and horizontal sections in
+pp. 46, 47, is completed by the misprint of vertical for horizontal in the
+third line of p. 43, and of horizontal for vertical in the fifth line from
+bottom of p. 46; while Figure 45 is to me totally unintelligible, this
+being, as far as can be made out by the lettering, a section of a tree stem
+which has its marrow on the outside!
+
+[40] "Try a bit of rhubarb" (says A, who sends me a pretty drawing of
+rhubarb pith); but as rhubarb does not grow into wood, inapplicable to our
+present subject; and if we descend to annual plants, rush pith is the thing
+to be examined.
+
+[41] I am too lazy now to translate, and shall trust to the chance of some
+remnant, among my readers, of classical study, even in modern England.
+
+[42] '_Or_ woody tissue,' suggests A. It is 'and' in Balfour.
+
+[43] Terms not used now, but others quite as bad: Cuticle, Epidermis,
+Cortical layer, Periderm, Cambium, Phelloderm--six hard words for 'BARK,'
+says my careful annotator. "Yes; and these new six to be changed for six
+newer ones next year, no doubt."
+
+[44] "At first the vessels are pervious and full of _fluid_, but by degrees
+thickening layers are deposited, which contract their canal."--BALFOUR.
+
+[45] I cannot better this earlier statement, which in beginning
+'Proserpina,' I intended to form a part of that work; but, as readers
+already in possession of it in the original form, ought not to be burdened
+with its repetition, I shall republish those chapters as a supplement,
+which I trust may be soon issued.
+
+[46] "'Diachyma' is parenchyma in the middle of a leaf!" (Balfour, Art.
+137.) Henceforward, if I ever make botanical quotations, I shall always
+call parenchyma, By-tis; prosenchyma, To-tis; and diachyma, Through-tis,
+short for By-tissue, To-tissue, and Through-tissue--then the student will
+see what all this modern wisdom comes to!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Proserpina, Volume 2, by John  Ruskin
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