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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Proserpina, Volume 1, 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 1
+       Studies Of Wayside Flowers
+
+Author: John  Ruskin
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2007 [EBook #20421]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROSERPINA, VOLUME 1 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Keith Edkins and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they
+are listed at the end of the text. Original page numbers are shown as {99}.
+
+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 CHRIST CHURCH, AND SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ART.
+
+                     "Oh--Proserpina!
+  For the flowers now, which frighted, thou let'st fall
+  From Dis's waggon."
+
+VOLUME I.
+
+New York:
+JOHN WILEY & SONS,
+15 Astor Place.
+
+1888.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+Press of J. J. Little & Co.,
+Astor Place, New York.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I
+
+  PAGE
+  INTRODUCTION,                 1
+
+  CHAPTER I.
+  MOSS,                        12
+
+  CHAPTER II.
+  THE ROOT,                    26
+
+  CHAPTER III.
+  THE LEAF,                    40
+
+  CHAPTER IV.
+  THE FLOWER,                  64
+
+  CHAPTER V.
+  PAPAVER RHOEAS,              86
+
+  CHAPTER VI.
+  THE PARABLE OF JOASH,       106
+
+  CHAPTER VII.
+  THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM,      117
+
+  CHAPTER VIII.
+  THE STEM,                   127
+
+  CHAPTER IX.
+  OUTSIDE AND IN,             151
+
+  CHAPTER X.
+  THE BARK,                   170
+
+  CHAPTER XI.
+  GENEALOGY,                  176
+
+  CHAPTER XII.
+  CORA AND KRONOS,            205
+
+  CHAPTER XIII.
+  THE SEED AND HUSK,          219
+
+  CHAPTER XIV.
+  THE FRUIT GIFT,             227
+
+  INDEX I.
+  DESCRIPTIVE NOMENCLATURE,   239
+
+  INDEX II.
+  ENGLISH NAMES,              255
+
+  INDEX III.
+  LATIN OR GREEK NAMES,       258
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+{1}
+
+PROSERPINA.
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+BRANTWOOD, _14th March, 1874._
+
+Yesterday evening I was looking over the first book in which I studied
+Botany,--Curtis's Magazine, published in 1795 at No. 3, St. George's
+Crescent, Blackfriars Road, and sold by the principal booksellers in Great
+Britain and Ireland. Its plates are excellent, so that I am always glad to
+find in it the picture of a flower I know. And I came yesterday upon what I
+suppose to be a variety of a favourite flower of mine, called, in Curtis,
+"the St. Bruno's Lily."
+
+I am obliged to say "what I suppose to be a variety," because my pet lily
+is branched,[1] while this is drawn as unbranched, and especially stated to
+be so. And the page of text, in which this statement is made, is so
+characteristic of botanical books, and botanical science, not to say all
+science as hitherto taught for the blessing of mankind; {2} and of the
+difficulties thereby accompanying its communication, that I extract the
+page entire, printing it, opposite, as nearly as possible in facsimile.
+
+Now you observe, in this instructive page, that you have in the first
+place, nine names given you for one flower; and that among these nine
+names, you are not even at liberty to make your choice, because the united
+authority of Haller and Miller may be considered as an accurate balance to
+the single authority of Linnaeus; and you ought therefore for the present to
+remain, yourself, balanced between the sides. You may be farther
+embarrassed by finding that the Anthericum of Savoy is only described as
+growing in Switzerland. And farther still, by finding that Mr. Miller
+describes two varieties of it, which differ only in size, while you are
+left to conjecture whether the one here figured is the larger or smaller;
+and how great the difference is.
+
+Farther, If you wish to know anything of the habits of the plant, as well
+as its nine names, you are informed that it grows both at the bottoms of
+the mountains, and the tops; and that, with us, it flowers in May and
+June,--but you are not told when, in its native country.
+
+The four lines of the last clause but one, may indeed be useful to
+gardeners; but--although I know my good father and mother did the best they
+could for me in buying this beautiful book; and though the admirable plates
+of it did their work, and taught me much, I cannot wonder that neither my
+infantine nor boyish mind was irresistibly attracted by the text of which
+this page is one of the most favourable specimens; nor, in consequence,
+that my botanical studies were--when I had attained the age of fifty--no
+farther advanced than the reader will find them in the opening chapter of
+this book.
+
+{3}
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                  [318]
+
+    ANTHERICUM LILIASTRUM, SAVOY ANTHERICUM,
+    or ST. BRUNO'S LILY.
+
+    _Class and Order._
+
+    HEXANDRIA MONOGYNIA.
+
+    _Generic Character._
+
+    _Cor._ 6-petala, patens. _Caps._ ovata.
+
+    _Specific Character and Synonyms._
+
+    ANTHERICUM _Liliastrum_ foliis planis, scapo simplicissimo, corollis
+    campanulatis, staminibus declinatis. _Linn.    Syst. Vegetab. ed. 14.
+    Murr. p. 330._ _Ait. Kew. v. _I._    p. 449._
+
+    HEMEROCALLIS floribus patulis secundis. _Hall. Hist. n. 1230._
+
+    PHALANGIUM magno flore. _Bauh. Pin. 29._
+
+    PHALANGIUM Allobrogicum majus. _Clus. cur. app. alt._
+
+    PHALANGIUM Allobrogicum. The Savoye Spider-wort. _Park.    Parad. p.
+    150. tab. 151. f. 1._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Botanists are divided in their opinions respecting the genus of this
+    plant; LINNAEUS considers it as an _Anthericum_, HALLER and MILLER make
+    it an _Hemerocallis_.
+
+    It is a native of Switzerland, where, HALLER informs us it grows
+    abundantly in the Alpine meadows, and even on the summits of the
+    mountains; with us it flowers in May and June.
+
+    It is a plant of great elegance, producing on an unbranched stem about
+    a foot and a half high, numerous flowers of a delicate white colour,
+    much smaller but resembling in form those of the common white lily,
+    possessing a considerable degree of fragrance, their beauty is
+    heightened by the rich orange colour of their antherae; unfortunately
+    they are but of short duration.
+
+    MILLER describes two varieties of it differing merely in size.
+
+    A loamy soil, a situation moderately moist, with an eastern or western
+    exposure, suits this plant best; so situated, it will increase by its
+    roots, though not very fast, and by parting of these in the autumn, it
+    is usually propagated.
+
+    PARKINSON describes and figures it in his _Parad. Terrest._, observing
+    that "divers allured by the beauty of its flowers, had brought it into
+    these parts."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{4}
+
+Which said book was therefore undertaken, to put, if it might be, some
+elements of the science of botany into a form more tenable by ordinary
+human and childish faculties; or--for I can scarcely say I have yet any
+tenure of it myself--to make the paths of approach to it more pleasant. In
+fact, I only know, of it, the pleasant distant effects which it bears to
+simple eyes; and some pretty mists and mysteries, which I invite my young
+readers to pierce, as they may, for themselves,--my power of guiding them
+being only for a little way.
+
+Pretty mysteries, I say, as opposed to the vulgar and ugly mysteries of the
+so-called science of botany,--exemplified sufficiently in this chosen page.
+Respecting which, please observe farther;--Nobody--I can say this very
+boldly--loves Latin more dearly than I; but, precisely because I do love it
+(as well as for other reasons), I have always insisted that books, whether
+scientific or not, ought to be written either in Latin, or English; and not
+in a doggish mixture of the refuse of both.
+
+Linnaeus wrote a noble book of universal Natural History in Latin. It is one
+of the permanent classical treasures of the world. And if any scientific
+man thinks his labors are worth the world's attention, let him, also, write
+{5} what he has to say in Latin, finishedly and exquisitely, if it take him
+a month to a page.[2]
+
+But if--which, unless he be one chosen of millions, is assuredly the
+fact--his lucubrations are only of local and temporary consequence, let him
+write, as clearly as he can, in his native language.
+
+This book, accordingly, I have written in English; (not, by the way, that I
+_could_ have written it in anything else--so there are small thanks to me);
+and one of its purposes is to interpret, for young English readers, the
+necessary European Latin or Greek names of flowers, and to make them vivid
+and vital to their understandings. But two great difficulties occur in
+doing this. The first, that there are generally from three or four, up to
+two dozen, Latin names current for every flower; and every new botanist
+thinks his eminence only to be properly asserted by adding another.
+
+The second, and a much more serious one, is of the Devil's own
+contriving--(and remember I am always quite serious when I speak of the
+Devil,)--namely, that the most current and authoritative names are apt to
+be founded on some unclean or debasing association, so that to interpret
+them is to defile the reader's mind. I will give no instance; too many will
+at once occur to any {6} learned reader, and the unlearned I need not vex
+with so much as one: but, in such cases, since I could only take refuge in
+the untranslated word by leaving other Greek or Latin words also
+untranslated, and the nomenclature still entirely senseless,--and I do not
+choose to do this,--there is only one other course open to me, namely, to
+substitute boldly, to my own pupils, other generic names for the plants
+thus faultfully hitherto titled.
+
+As I do not do this for my own pride, but honestly for my reader's service,
+I neither question nor care how far the emendations I propose may be now or
+hereafter adopted. I shall not even name the cases in which they have been
+made for the serious reason above specified; but even shall mask those
+which there was real occasion to alter, by sometimes giving new names in
+cases where there was no necessity of such kind. Doubtless I shall be
+accused of doing myself what I violently blame in others. I do so; but with
+a different motive--of which let the reader judge as he is disposed. The
+practical result will be that the children who learn botany on the system
+adopted in this book will know the useful and beautiful names of plants
+hitherto given, in all languages; the useless and ugly ones they will not
+know. And they will have to learn one Latin name for each plant, which,
+when differing from the common one, I trust may yet by some scientific
+persons be accepted, and with ultimate advantage.
+
+The learning of the one Latin name--as, for instance, Gramen striatum--I
+hope will be accurately enforced {7} always;--but not less carefully the
+learning of the pretty English one--"Ladielace Grass"--with due observance
+that "Ladies' laces hath leaves like unto Millet in fashion, with many
+white vaines or ribs, and silver strakes running along through the middest
+of the leaves, fashioning the same like to laces of white and green silk,
+very beautiful and faire to behold."
+
+I have said elsewhere, and can scarcely repeat too often, that a day will
+come when men of science will think their names disgraced, instead of
+honoured, by being used to barbarise nomenclature; I hope therefore that my
+own name may be kept well out of the way; but, having been privileged to
+found the School of Art in the University of Oxford, I think that I am
+justified in requesting any scientific writers who may look kindly upon
+this book, to add such of the names suggested in it as they think deserving
+of acceptance, to their own lists of synonyms, under the head of "Schol.
+Art. Oxon."
+
+The difficulties thrown in the way of any quiet private student by existing
+nomenclature may be best illustrated by my simply stating what happens to
+myself in endeavouring to use the page above facsimile'd. Not knowing how
+far St. Bruno's Lily might be connected with my own pet one, and not having
+any sufficient book on Swiss botany, I take down Loudon's Encyclopaedia of
+Plants, (a most useful book, as far as any book in the present state of the
+science _can_ be useful,) and find, under the head of Anthericum, the Savoy
+Lily indeed, but only the {8} following general information:--"809.
+Anthericum. A name applied by the Greeks to the stem of the asphodel, and
+not misapplied to this set of plants, which in some sort resemble the
+asphodel. Plants with fleshy leaves, and spikes of bright _yellow_ flowers,
+easily cultivated if kept dry."
+
+Hunting further, I find again my Savoy lily called a spider-plant, under
+the article Hemerocallis, and the only information which the book gives me
+under Hemerocallis, is that it means 'beautiful day' lily; and then, "This
+is an ornamental genus of the easiest culture. The species are remarkable
+among border flowers for their fine _orange_, _yellow_, or _blue_ flowers.
+The Hemerocallis coerulea has been considered a distinct genus by Mr.
+Salisbury, and called Saussurea." As I correct this sheet for press,
+however, I find that the Hemerocallis is now to be called 'Funkia,' "in
+honour of Mr. Funk, a Prussian apothecary."
+
+All this while, meantime, I have a suspicion that my pet Savoy Lily is not,
+in existing classification, an Anthericum, nor a Hemerocallis, but a
+Lilium. It is, in fact, simply a Turk's cap which doesn't curl up. But on
+trying 'Lilium' in Loudon, I find no mention whatever of any wild branched
+white lily.
+
+I then try the next word in my specimen page of Curtis; but there is no
+'Phalangium' at all in Loudon's index. And now I have neither time nor mind
+for more search, but will give, in due place, such account as I can {9} of
+my own dwarf branched lily, which I shall call St. Bruno's, as well as this
+Liliastrum--no offence to the saint, I hope. For it grows very gloriously
+on the limestones of Savoy, presumably, therefore, at the Grande
+Chartreuse; though I did not notice it there, and made a very unmonkish use
+of it when I gathered it last:--There was a pretty young English lady at
+the table-d'hote, in the Hotel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin's,[3] and I
+wanted to get speech of her, and didn't know how. So all I could think of
+was to go half-way up the Aiguille de Varens, to gather St. Bruno's lilies;
+and I made a great cluster of them, and put wild roses all around them as I
+came down. I never saw anything so lovely; and I thought to present this to
+her before dinner,--but when I got down, she had gone away to Chamouni. My
+Fors always treated me like that, in affairs of the heart.
+
+I had begun my studies of Alpine botany just eighteen years before, in
+1842, by making a careful drawing of wood-sorrel at Chamouni; and bitterly
+sorry I am, now, that the work was interrupted. For I drew, then, very
+delicately; and should have made a pretty book if I could have got peace.
+Even yet, I can manage my point a little, and would far rather be making
+outlines of flowers, than writing; and I meant to have drawn every English
+and Scottish wild flower, like this cluster of bog heather
+opposite,[4]--back, and profile, and front. But 'Blackwood's {10}
+Magazine,' with its insults to Turner, dragged me into controversy; and I
+have not had, properly speaking, a day's peace since; so that in 1868 my
+botanical studies were advanced only as far as the reader will see in next
+chapter; and now, in 1874, must end altogether, I suppose, heavier thoughts
+and work coming fast on me. So that, finding among my notebooks, two or
+three, full of broken materials for the proposed work on flowers; and,
+thinking they may be useful even as fragments, I am going to publish them
+in their present state,--only let the reader note that while my other books
+endeavour, and claim, so far as they reach, to give trustworthy knowledge
+of their subjects, this one only shows how such knowledge may be obtained;
+and it is little more than a history of efforts and plans,--but of both, I
+believe, made in right methods.
+
+One part of the book, however, will, I think, be found of permanent value.
+Mr. Burgess has engraved on wood, in reduced size, with consummate skill,
+some of the excellent old drawings in the Flora Danica, and has
+interpreted, and facsimile'd, some of his own and my drawings from nature,
+with a vigour and precision unsurpassed in woodcut illustration, which
+render these outlines the best exercises in black and white I have yet been
+able to {11} prepare for my drawing pupils. The larger engravings by Mr.
+Allen may also be used with advantage as copies for drawings with pen or
+sepia.
+
+ROME, _10th May_ (_my father's birthday_).
+
+I found the loveliest blue asphodel I ever saw in my life, yesterday, in
+the fields beyond Monte Mario,--a spire two feet high, of more than two
+hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue, as well as the flowers.
+Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields,
+some day!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{12}
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MOSS.
+
+DENMARK HILL, _3rd November, 1868._
+
+1. It is mortifying enough to write,--but I think thus much ought to be
+written,--concerning myself, as 'the author of Modern Painters.' In three
+months I shall be fifty years old: and I don't at this hour--ten o'clock in
+the morning of the two hundred and sixty-eighth day of my forty-ninth
+year--know what 'moss' is.
+
+There is nothing I have more _intended_ to know--some day or other. But the
+moss 'would always be there'; and then it was so beautiful, and so
+difficult to examine, that one could only do it in some quite separated
+time of happy leisure--which came not. I never was like to have less
+leisure than now, but I _will_ know what moss is, if possible, forthwith.
+
+2. To that end I read preparatorily, yesterday, what account I could find
+of it in all the botanical books in the house. Out of them all, I get this
+general notion of a moss,--that it has a fine fibrous root,--a stem
+surrounded with spirally set leaves,--and produces its fruit in a small
+case, under a cap. I fasten especially, however, on a {13} sentence of
+Louis Figuier's, about the particular species, Hypnum:--
+
+"These mosses, which often form little islets of verdure at the feet of
+poplars and willows, are robust vegetable organisms, which do not
+decay."[5]
+
+3. "Qui ne pourrissent point." What do they do with themselves, then?--it
+immediately occurs to me to ask. And, secondly,--If this immortality
+belongs to the Hypnum only?
+
+It certainly does not, by any means: but, however modified or limited, this
+immortality is the first thing we ought to take note of in the mosses. They
+are, in some degree, what the "everlasting" is in flowers. Those minute
+green leaves of theirs do not decay, nor fall.
+
+But how do they die, or how stop growing, then?--it is the first thing I
+want to know about them. And from all the books in the house, I can't as
+yet find out this. Meanwhile I will look at the leaves themselves.
+
+4. Going out to the garden, I bring in a bit of old brick, emerald green on
+its rugged surface,[6] and a thick piece of mossy turf.
+
+First, for the old brick: To think of the quantity of pleasure one has had
+in one's life from that emerald green velvet,--and yet that for the first
+time to-day I am verily going to look at it! Doing so, through a pocket
+{14} lens of no great power, I find the velvet to be composed of small
+star-like groups of smooth, strong, oval leaves,--intensely green, and much
+like the young leaves of any other plant, except in this;--they all have a
+long brown spike, like a sting, at their ends.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
+
+5. Fastening on that, I take the Flora Danica,[7] and look through its
+plates of mosses, for their leaves only; and I find, first, that this
+spike, or strong central rib, is characteristic;--secondly, that the said
+leaves are apt to be not only spiked, but serrated, and otherwise
+angry-looking at the points;--thirdly, that they have a tendency to fold
+together in the centre (Fig. 1[8]); and at last, after an hour's work at
+them, it strikes me suddenly that they are more like pineapple leaves than
+anything else.
+
+And it occurs to me, very unpleasantly, at the same time, that I don't know
+what a pineapple is!
+
+Stopping to ascertain that, I am told that a pineapple belongs to the
+'Bromeliaceae'--(can't stop to find out what that means)--nay, that of these
+plants "the pineapple is the representative" (Loudon); "their habit is
+acid, their leaves rigid, and toothed with spines, their {15} bracteas
+often coloured with scarlet, and their flowers either white or blue"--(what
+are their flowers like?) But the two sentences that most interest me, are,
+that in the damp forests of Carolina, the Tillandsia, which is an
+'epiphyte' (_i.e._, a plant growing on other plants,) "forms dense festoons
+among the branches of the trees, vegetating among the black mould that
+collects upon the bark of trees in hot damp countries; other species are
+inhabitants of deep and gloomy forests, and others form, with their spring
+leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas of Brazil." So they really
+seem to be a kind of moss, on a vast scale.
+
+6. Next, I find in Gray,[9] Bromeliaceae, and--the very thing I
+want--"Tillandsia, the black _moss_, or long moss, which, _like most
+Bromelias_, grows on the branches of trees." So the pineapple is really a
+moss; only it is a moss that flowers but 'imperfectly.' "The fine fruit is
+caused by the consolidation of the imperfect flowers." (I wish we could
+consolidate some imperfect English moss-flowers into little pineapples
+then,--though they were only as big as filberts.) But we cannot follow that
+farther now; nor consider when a flower is perfect, and when it is not, or
+we should get into morals, and I don't know where else; we will go back to
+the moss I have gathered, for I begin to see my way, a little, to
+understanding it.
+
+{16}
+
+7. The second piece I have on the table is a cluster--an inch or two
+deep--of the moss that grows everywhere, and that the birds use for
+nest-building, and we for packing, and the like. It is dry, since
+yesterday, and its fibres define themselves against the dark ground in warm
+green, touched with a glittering light. Note that burnished lustre of the
+minute leaves; they are necessarily always relieved against dark hollows,
+and this lustre makes them much clearer and brighter than if they were of
+dead green. In that lustre--and it is characteristic of them--they differ
+wholly from the dead, aloe-like texture of the pineapple leaf; and remind
+me, as I look at them closely, a little of some conditions of chaff, as on
+heads of wheat after being threshed. I will hunt down that clue presently;
+meantime there is something else to be noticed on the old brick.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
+
+8. Out of its emerald green cushions of minute leaves, there rise, here and
+there, thin red threads, each with a little brown cap, or something like a
+cap, at the top of it. These red threads shooting up out of the green
+tufts, are, I believe, the fructification of the moss; fringing its surface
+in the woods, and on the rocks, with the small forests of brown stems, each
+carrying its pointed cap or crest--of infinitely varied 'mode,' as we shall
+see presently; and, which is one of their most blessed functions, carrying
+high the dew in the morning; every spear balancing its own crystal globe.
+
+9. And now, with my own broken memories of moss {17} and this unbroken,
+though unfinished, gift of the noble labour of other people, the Flora
+Danica, I can generalize the idea of the precious little plant, for myself,
+and for the reader.
+
+All mosses, I believe, (with such exceptions and collateral groups as we
+may afterwards discover, but they are not many,) that is to say, some
+thousands of species, are, in their strength of existence, composed of
+fibres surrounded by clusters of dry _spinous_ leaves, set close to the
+fibre they grow on. Out of this leafy stern descends a fibrous root, and
+ascends in its season, a capped seed.
+
+We must get this very clearly into our heads. Fig. 2, A, is a little tuft
+of a common wood moss of Norway,[10] in its fruit season, of its real size;
+but at present I want to look at the central fibre and its leaves
+accurately, and understand that first.
+
+10. Pulling it to pieces, we find it composed of seven little
+company-keeping fibres, each of which, by itself, appears as in Fig. 2, B:
+but as in this, its real size, it {18} is too small, not indeed for our
+respect, but for our comprehension, we magnify it, Fig. 2, C, and thereupon
+perceive it to be indeed composed of, _a_, the small fibrous root which
+sustains the plant; _b_, the leaf-surrounded stem which is the actual
+being, and main creature, moss; and, _c_, the aspirant pillar, and cap, of
+its fructification.
+
+11. But there is one minor division yet. You see I have drawn the central
+part of the moss plant (_b_, Fig. 2,) half in outline and half in black;
+and that, similarly, in the upper group, which is too small to show the
+real roots, the base of the cluster is black. And you remember, I doubt
+not, how often in gathering what most invited gathering, of deep green,
+starry, perfectly soft and living wood-moss, you found it fall asunder in
+your hand into multitudes of separate threads, each with its bright green
+crest, and long root of blackness.
+
+That blackness at the root--though only so notable in this wood-moss and
+collateral species, is indeed a general character of the mosses, with rare
+exceptions. It is their funeral blackness;--that, I perceive, is the way
+the moss leaves die. They do not fall--they do not visibly decay. But they
+decay _in_visibly, in continual secession, beneath the ascending crest.
+They rise to form that crest, all green and bright, and take the light and
+air from those out of which they grew;--and those, their ancestors, darken
+and die slowly, and at last become a mass of mouldering ground. In fact, as
+I perceive farther, their final duty is so to die. The main work of other
+leaves is {19} in their life,--but these have to form the earth out of
+which all other leaves are to grow. Not to cover the rocks with golden
+velvet only, but to fill their crannies with the dark earth, through which
+nobler creatures shall one day seek their being.
+
+12. "Grant but as many sorts of mind as moss." Pope could not have known
+the hundredth part of the number of 'sorts' of moss there are; and I
+suppose he only chose the word because it was a monosyllable beginning with
+m, and the best English general expression for despised and minute
+structures of plants. But a fate rules the words of wise men, which makes
+their words truer, and worth more, than the men themselves know. No other
+plants have so endless variety on so similar a structure as the mosses; and
+none teach so well the humility of Death. As for the death of our bodies,
+we have learned, wisely, or unwisely, to look the fact of that in the face.
+But none of us, I think, yet care to look the fact of the death of our
+minds in the face. I do not mean death of our souls, but of our mental
+work. So far as it is good _art_, indeed, and done in realistic form, it
+may perhaps not die; but so far as it was only good _thought_--good, for
+its time, and apparently a great achievement therein--that good, useful
+thought may yet in the future become a foolish thought, and then die quite
+away,--it, and the memory of it,--when better thought and knowledge come.
+But the better thought could not have come if the weaker thought had not
+come first, and died in sustaining the {20} better. If we think honestly,
+our thoughts will not only live usefully, but even perish usefully--like
+the moss--and become dark, not without due service. But if we think
+dishonestly, or malignantly, our thoughts will die like evil
+fungi,--dripping corrupt dew.
+
+13. But farther. If you have walked moorlands enough to know the look of
+them, you know well those flat spaces or causeways of bright green or
+golden ground between the heathy rock masses; which signify winding pools
+and inlets of stagnant water caught among the rocks;--pools which the deep
+moss that covers them--_blanched_, not black, at the root,--is slowly
+filling and making firm; whence generally the unsafe ground in the moorland
+gets known by being _mossy_ instead of heathy; and is at last called by its
+riders, briefly, 'the Moss': and as it is mainly at these same mossy places
+that the riding is difficult, and brings out the gifts of horse and rider,
+and discomfits all followers not similarly gifted, the skilled crosser of
+them got his name, naturally, of 'moss-rider,' or moss-trooper. In which
+manner the moss of Norway and Scotland has been a taskmaster and Maker of
+Soldiers, as yet, the strongest known among natural powers. The lightning
+may kill a man, or cast down a tower, but these little tender leaves of
+moss--they and their progenitors--have trained the Northern Armies.
+
+14. So much for the human meaning of that decay of the leaves. Now to go
+back to the little creatures themselves. It seems that the upper part of
+the moss fibre is {21} especially _un_decaying among leaves; and the lower
+part, especially decaying. That, in fact, a plant of moss-fibre is a kind
+of persistent state of what is, in other plants, annual. Watch the year's
+growth of any luxuriant flower. First it comes out of the ground all fresh
+and bright; then, as the higher leaves and branches shoot up, those first
+leaves near the ground get brown, sickly, earthy,--remain for ever degraded
+in the dust, and under the dashed slime in rain, staining, and grieving,
+and loading them with obloquy of envious earth, half-killing them,--only
+life enough left in them to hold on the stem, and to be guardians of the
+rest of the plant from all they suffer;--while, above them, the happier
+leaves, for whom they are thus oppressed, bend freely to the sunshine, and
+drink the rain pure.
+
+The moss strengthens on a diminished scale, intensifies, and makes
+perpetual, these two states,--bright leaves above that never wither, leaves
+beneath that exist only to wither.
+
+15. I have hitherto spoken only of the fading moss as it is needed for
+change into earth. But I am not sure whether a yet more important office,
+in its days of age, be not its use as a colour.
+
+We are all thankful enough--as far as we ever are so--for green moss, and
+yellow moss. But we are never enough grateful for black moss. The golden
+would be nothing without it, nor even the grey.
+
+It is true that there are black lichens enough, and {22} brown ones:
+nevertheless, the chief use of lichens is for silver and gold colour on
+rocks; and it is the dead moss which gives the leopard-like touches of
+black. And yet here again--as to a thing I have been looking at and
+painting all my life--I am brought to pause, the moment I think of it
+carefully. The black moss which gives the precious Velasquez touches, lies,
+much of it, flat on the rocks; radiating from its centres--powdering in the
+fingers, if one breaks it off, like dry tea. Is it a black species?--or a
+black-parched state of other species, perishing for the sake of Velasquez
+effects, instead of accumulation of earth? and, if so, does it die of
+drought, accidentally, or, in a sere old age, naturally? and how is it
+related to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet? And there again
+is another matter not clear to me. One calls them 'velvet' because they are
+all brought to an even surface at the top. Our own velvet is reduced to
+such trimness by cutting. But how is the moss trimmed? By what scissors?
+Carefullest Elizabethan gardener never shaped his yew hedge more daintily
+than the moss fairies smooth these soft rounded surfaces of green and gold.
+And just fancy the difference, if they were ragged! If the fibres had every
+one of them leave to grow at their own sweet will, and to be long or short
+as they liked, or, worse still, urged by fairy prizes into laboriously and
+agonizingly trying which could grow longest. Fancy the surface of a spot of
+competitive moss!
+
+16. But how is it that they are subdued into that {23} spherical obedience,
+like a crystal of wavellite?[11] Strange--that the vegetable creatures
+growing so fondly on rocks should form themselves in that mineral-like
+manner. It is true that the tops of all well-grown trees are rounded, on a
+large scale, as equally; but that is because they grow from a central stem,
+while these mossy mounds are made out of independent filaments, each
+growing to exactly his proper height in the sphere--short ones outside,
+long in the middle. Stop, though; _is_ that so? I am not even sure of that;
+perhaps they are built over a little dome of decayed moss below.[12] I must
+find out how every {24} filament grows, separately--from root to cap,
+through the spirally set leaves. And meanwhile I don't know very clearly so
+much as what a root is--or what a leaf is. Before puzzling myself any
+farther in examination either of moss or any other grander vegetable, I had
+better define these primal forms of all vegetation, as well as I can--or
+rather begin the definition of them, for future completion and correction.
+For, as my reader must already sufficiently perceive, this book is
+literally to be one of studies--not of statements. Some one said of me
+once, very shrewdly, When he wants to work out a subject, he writes a book
+on it. That is a very true saying in the main,--I work down or up to my
+mark, and let the reader see process and progress, not caring to conceal
+them. But this book will be nothing but process. I don't mean to assert
+anything positively in it from the first page to the last. Whatever I say,
+is to be understood only as a conditional statement--liable to, and
+inviting, correction. And this the more because, as on the whole, I am at
+war with the botanists, I can't ask them to help me, and then {25} call
+them names afterwards. I hope only for a contemptuous heaping of coals on
+my head by correction of my errors from them;--in some cases, my scientific
+friends will, I know, give me forgiving aid;--but, for many reasons, I am
+forced first to print the imperfect statement, as I can independently shape
+it; for if once I asked for, or received help, every thought would be
+frostbitten into timid expression, and every sentence broken by apology. I
+should have to write a dozen of letters before I could print a line, and
+the line, at last, would be only like a bit of any other botanical
+book--trustworthy, it might be, perhaps; but certainly unreadable. Whereas
+now, it will rather put things more forcibly in the reader's mind to have
+them retouched and corrected as we go on; and our natural and honest
+mistakes will often be suggestive of things we could not have discovered
+but by wandering.
+
+On these guarded conditions, then, I proceed to study, with my reader, the
+first general laws of vegetable form.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{26}
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE ROOT.
+
+1. Plants in their perfect form consist of four principal parts,--the Root,
+Stem, Leaf, and Flower. It is true that the stem and flower are parts, or
+remnants, or altered states, of the leaves; and that, speaking with close
+accuracy, we might say, a perfect plant consists of leaf and root. But the
+division into these four parts is best for practical purposes, and it will
+be desirable to note a few general facts about each, before endeavouring to
+describe any one kind of plant. Only, because the character of the stem
+depends on the nature of the leaf and flower, we must put it last in order
+of examination; and trace the development of the plant first in root and
+leaf; then in the flower and its fruit; and lastly in the stem.
+
+2. First, then, the Root.
+
+Every plant is divided, as I just said, in the main, into two parts, and
+these have opposite natures. One part seeks the light; the other hates it.
+One part feeds on the air; the other on the dust.
+
+The part that loves the light is called the Leaf. It is an old Saxon word;
+I cannot get at its origin. The part that hates the light is called the
+Root. {27}
+
+In Greek, [Greek: rhiza], Rhiza.[13]
+
+In Latin, Radix, "the growing thing," which shortens, in French, into Race,
+and then they put on the diminutive 'ine,' and get their two words, Race,
+and Racine, of which we keep Race for animals, and use for vegetables a
+word of our own Saxon (and Dutch) dialect,--'root'; (connected with
+Rood--an image of wood; whence at last the Holy Rood, or Tree).
+
+3. The Root has three great functions:
+
+  1st. To hold the plant in its place.
+  2nd. To nourish it with earth.
+  3rd. To receive vital power for it from the earth.
+
+With this last office is in some degree,--and especially in certain
+plants,--connected, that of reproduction.
+
+But in all plants the root has these three essential functions.
+
+First, I said, to hold the Plant in its place. The Root is its Fetter.
+
+You think it, perhaps, a matter of course that a plant is not to be a
+crawling thing? It is not a matter of course at all. A vegetable might be
+just what it is now, as compared with an animal;--might live on earth and
+water instead of on meat,--might be as senseless in life, as calm in death,
+and in all its parts and apparent structure {28} unchanged; and yet be a
+crawling thing. It is quite as easy to conceive plants moving about like
+lizards, putting forward first one root and then another, as it is to think
+of them fastened to their place. It might have been well for them, one
+would have thought, to have the power of going down to the streams to
+drink, in time of drought;--of migrating in winter with grim march from
+north to south of Dunsinane Hill side. But that is not their appointed
+Fate. They are--at least all the noblest of them, rooted to their spot.
+Their honour and use is in giving immoveable shelter,--in remaining
+landmarks, or lovemarks, when all else is changed:
+
+ "The cedars wave on Lebanon,
+  But Judah's statelier maids are gone."
+
+4. Its root is thus a form of fate to the tree. It condemns, or indulges
+it, in its place. These semi-living creatures, come what may, shall abide,
+happy, or tormented. No doubt concerning "the position in which Providence
+has placed _them_" is to trouble their minds, except so far as they can
+mend it by seeking light, or shrinking from wind, or grasping at support,
+within certain limits. In the thoughts of men they have thus become twofold
+images,--on the one side, of spirits restrained and half destroyed, whence
+the fables of transformation into trees; on the other, of spirits patient
+and continuing, having root in themselves and in good ground, capable of
+all persistent {29} effort and vital stability, both in themselves, and for
+the human States they form.
+
+5. In this function of holding fast, roots have a power of grasp quite
+different from that of branches. It is not a grasp, or clutch by
+contraction, as that of a bird's claw, or of the small branches we call
+'tendrils' in climbing plants. It is a dead, clumsy, but inevitable grasp,
+by swelling, _after_ contortion. For there is this main difference between
+a branch and root, that a branch cannot grow vividly but in certain
+directions and relations to its neighbour branches; but a root can grow
+wherever there is earth, and can turn in any direction to avoid an
+obstacle.[14]
+
+6. In thus contriving access for itself where it chooses, a root contorts
+itself into more serpent-like writhing than branches can; and when it has
+once coiled partly round a rock, or stone, it grasps it tight, necessarily,
+merely by swelling. Now a root has force enough sometimes to split rocks,
+but not to crush them; so it is compelled to grasp by _flattening_ as it
+thickens; and, as it must have room somewhere, it alters its own shape as
+if it were made of {30} dough, and holds the rock, not in a claw, but in a
+wooden cast or mould, adhering to its surface. And thus it not only finds
+its anchorage in the rock, but binds the rocks of its anchorage with a
+constrictor cable.
+
+7. Hence--and this is a most important secondary function--roots bind
+together the ragged edges of rocks as a hem does the torn edge of a dress:
+they literally stitch the stones together; so that, while it is always
+dangerous to pass under a treeless edge of overhanging crag, as soon as it
+has become beautiful with trees, it is safe also. The rending power of
+roots on rocks has been greatly overrated. Capillary attraction in a willow
+wand will indeed split granite, and swelling roots sometimes heave
+considerable masses aside, but on the whole, roots, small and great, bind,
+and do not rend.[15] The surfaces of mountains are dissolved and
+disordered, by rain, and frost, and chemical decomposition, into mere heaps
+of loose stones on their desolate summits; but, where the forests grow,
+soil accumulates and disintegration ceases. And by cutting down forests on
+great mountain slopes, not only is the climate destroyed, but the danger of
+superficial landslip fearfully increased.
+
+8. The second function of roots is to gather for the plant the nourishment
+it needs from the ground. This is {31} partly water, mixed with some kinds
+of air (ammonia, etc.,) but the plant can get both water and ammonia from
+the atmosphere; and, I believe, for the most part does so; though, when it
+cannot get water from the air, it will gladly drink by its roots. But the
+things it cannot receive from the air at all are certain earthy salts,
+essential to it (as iron is essential in our own blood), and of which when
+it has quite exhausted the earth, no more such plants can grow in that
+ground. On this subject you will find enough in any modern treatise on
+agriculture; all that I want you to note here is that this feeding function
+of the root is of a very delicate and discriminating kind, needing much
+searching and mining among the dust, to find what it wants. If it only
+wanted water, it could get most of that by spreading in mere soft senseless
+limbs, like sponge, as far, and as far down, as it could--but to get the
+_salt_ out of the earth it has to _sift_ all the earth, and taste and touch
+every grain of it that it can, with fine fibres. And therefore a root is
+not at all a merely passive sponge or absorbing thing, but an infinitely
+subtle tongue, or tasting and eating thing. That is why it is always so
+fibrous and divided and entangled in the clinging earth.
+
+9. "Always fibrous and divided"? But many roots are quite hard and solid!
+
+No; the active part of the root is always, I believe, a fibre. But there is
+often a provident and passive part--a savings bank of root--in which
+nourishment is laid up for the plant, and which, though it may be
+underground, is no {32} more to be considered its real root than the kernel
+of a seed is. When you sow a pea, if you take it up in a day or two, you
+will find the fibre below, which is root; the shoot above, which is plant;
+and the pea as a now partly exhausted storehouse, looking very woful, and
+like the granaries of Paris after the fire. So, the round solid root of a
+cyclamen, or the conical one which you know so well as a carrot, are not
+properly roots, but permanent storehouses,--only the fibres that grow from
+them are roots. Then there are other apparent roots which are not even
+storehouses, but refuges; houses where the little plant lives in its
+infancy, through winter and rough weather. So that it will be best for you
+at once to limit your idea of a root to this,--that it is a group of
+growing fibres which taste and suck what is good for the plant out of the
+ground, and by their united strength hold it in its place; only remember
+the thick limbs of roots do not feed, but only the fine fibres at the ends
+of them which are something between tongues and sponges, and while they
+absorb moisture readily, are yet as particular about getting what they
+think nice to eat as any dainty little boy or girl; looking for it
+everywhere, and turning angry and sulky if they don't get it.
+
+10. But the root has, it seems to me, one more function, the most important
+of all. I say, it seems to me, for observe, what I have hitherto told you
+is all (I believe) ascertained and admitted; this that I am going to tell
+you has not yet, as far as I know, been asserted by men of {33} science,
+though I believe it to be demonstrable. But you are to examine into it, and
+think of it for yourself.
+
+There are some plants which appear to derive all their food from the
+air--which need nothing but a slight grasp of the ground to fix them in
+their place. Yet if we were to tie them into that place, in a framework,
+and cut them from their roots, they would die. Not only in these, but in
+all other plants, the vital power by which they shape and feed themselves,
+whatever that power may be, depends, I think, on that slight touch of the
+earth, and strange inheritance of its power. It is as essential to the
+plant's life as the connection of the head of an animal with its body by
+the spine is to the animal. Divide the feeble nervous thread, and all life
+ceases. Nay, in the tree the root is even of greater importance. You will
+not kill the tree, as you would an animal, by dividing its body or trunk.
+The part not severed from the root will shoot again. But in the root, and
+its touch of the ground, is the life of it. My own definition of a plant
+would be "a living creature whose source of vital energy is in the earth"
+(or in the water, as a form of the earth; that is, in inorganic substance).
+There is, however, one tribe of plants which seems nearly excepted from
+this law. It is a very strange one, having long been noted for the
+resemblance of its flowers to different insects; and it has recently been
+proved by Mr. Darwin to be dependent on insects for its existence. Doubly
+strange therefore, it seems, that in some cases this race of plants all but
+reaches the independent life of {34} insects. It rather _settles_ upon
+boughs than roots itself in them; half of its roots may wave in the air.
+
+11. What vital power is, men of science are not a step nearer knowing than
+they were four thousand years ago. They are, if anything, farther from
+knowing now than then, in that they imagine themselves nearer. But they
+know more about its limitations and manifestations than they did. They have
+even arrived at something like a proof that there is a fixed quantity of it
+flowing out of things and into them. But, for the present, rest content
+with the general and sure knowledge that, fixed or flowing, measurable or
+immeasurable--one with electricity or heat or light, or quite distinct from
+any of them--life is a delightful, and its negative, death, a dreadful
+thing, to human creatures; and that you can give or gather a certain
+quantity of life into plants, animals, and yourself by wisdom and courage,
+and by their reverses can bring upon them any quantity of death you please,
+which is a much more serious point for you to consider than what life and
+death are.
+
+12. Now, having got a quite clear idea of a root properly so called, we may
+observe what those storehouses, refuges, and ruins are, which we find
+connected with roots. The greater number of plants feed and grow at the
+same time; but there are some of them which like to feed first and grow
+afterwards. For the first year, or, at all events, the first period of
+their life, they gather material for their future life out of the ground
+and out {35} of the air, and lay it up in a storehouse as bees make combs.
+Of these stores--for the most part rounded masses tapering downwards into
+the ground--some are as good for human beings as honeycombs are; only not
+so sweet. We steal them from the plants, as we do from the bees, and these
+conical upside-down hives or treasuries of Atreus, under the names of
+carrots, turnips, and radishes, have had important influence on human
+fortunes. If we do not steal the store, next year the plant lives upon it,
+raises its stem, flowers and seeds out of that abundance, and having
+fulfilled its destiny, and provided for its successor, passes away, root
+and branch together.
+
+13. There is a pretty example of patience for us in this; and it would be
+well for young people generally to set themselves to grow in a carrotty or
+turnippy manner, and lay up secret store, not caring to exhibit it until
+the time comes for fruitful display. But they must not, in after-life,
+imitate the spendthrift vegetable, and blossom only in the strength of what
+they learned long ago; else they soon come to contemptible end. Wise people
+live like laurels and cedars, and go on mining in the earth, while they
+adorn and embalm the air.
+
+14. Secondly, Refuges. As flowers growing on trees have to live for some
+time, when they are young in their buds, so some flowers growing on the
+ground have to live for a while, when they are young, _in_ what we call
+their {36} roots. These are mostly among the Drosidae[16] and other humble
+tribes, loving the ground; and, in their babyhood, liking to live quite
+down in it. A baby crocus has literally its own little dome--domus, or
+duomo--within which in early spring it lives a delicate convent life of its
+own, quite free from all worldly care and dangers, exceedingly ignorant of
+things in general, but itself brightly golden and perfectly formed before
+it is brought out. These subterranean palaces and vaulted cloisters, which
+we call bulbs, are no more roots than the blade of grass is a root, in
+which the ear of corn forms before it shoots up.
+
+15. Thirdly, Ruins. The flowers which have these subterranean homes form
+one of many families whose roots, as well as seeds, have the power of
+reproduction. The succession of some plants is trusted much to their seeds:
+a thistle sows itself by its down, an oak by its acorns; the companies of
+flying emigrants settle where they may; and the shadowy tree is content to
+cast down its showers of nuts for swines' food with the chance that here
+and there one may become a ship's bulwark. But others among plants are less
+careless, or less proud. Many are anxious for their children to grow in the
+place where they grew themselves, and secure this not merely by letting
+their fruit fall at their feet, on the chance of its growing up {37} beside
+them, but by closer bond, bud springing forth from root, and the young
+plant being animated by the gradually surrendered life of its parent.
+Sometimes the young root is formed above the old one, as in the crocus, or
+beside it, as in the amaryllis, or beside it in a spiral succession, as in
+the orchis; in these cases the old root always perishes wholly when the
+young one is formed; but in a far greater number of tribes, one root
+connects itself with another by a short piece of intermediate stem; and
+this stem does not at once perish when the new root is formed, but grows on
+at one end indefinitely, perishing slowly at the other, the scars or ruins
+of the past plants being long traceable on its sides. When it grows
+entirely underground it is called a root-stock. But there is no essential
+distinction between a root-stock and a creeping stem, only the root-stock
+may be thought of as a stem which shares the melancholy humour of a root in
+loving darkness, while yet it has enough consciousness of better things to
+grow towards, or near, the light. In one family it is even fragrant where
+the flower is not, and a simple houseleek is called 'rhodiola rosea,'
+because its root-stock has the scent of a rose.
+
+16. There is one very unusual condition of the root-stock which has become
+of much importance in economy, though it is of little in botany; the
+forming, namely, of knots at the ends of the branches of the underground
+stem, where the new roots are to be thrown out. Of these knots, or
+'tubers,' (swollen things,) one kind, belonging to {38} the tobacco tribe,
+has been singularly harmful, together with its pungent relative, to a
+neighbouring country of ours, which perhaps may reach a higher destiny than
+any of its friends can conceive for it, if it can ever succeed in living
+without either the potato, or the pipe.
+
+17. Being prepared now to find among plants many things which are like
+roots, yet are not; you may simplify and make fast your true idea of a root
+as a fibre or group of fibres, which fixes, animates, and partly feeds the
+leaf. Then practically, as you examine plants in detail, ask first
+respecting them: What kind of root have they? Is it large or small in
+proportion to their bulk, and why is it so? What soil does it like, and
+what properties does it acquire from it? The endeavour to answer these
+questions will soon lead you to a rational inquiry into the plant's
+history. You will first ascertain what rock or earth it delights in, and
+what climate and circumstances; then you will see how its root is fitted to
+sustain it mechanically under given pressures and violences, and to find
+for it the necessary sustenance under given difficulties of famine or
+drought. Lastly you will consider what chemical actions appear to be going
+on in the root, or its store; what processes there are, and elements, which
+give pungency to the radish, flavour to the onion, or sweetness to the
+liquorice; and of what service each root may be made capable under
+cultivation, and by proper subsequent treatment, either to animals or men.
+
+18. I shall not attempt to do any of this for you; I {39} assume, in giving
+this advice, that you wish to pursue the science of botany as your chief
+study; I have only broken moments for it, snatched from my chief
+occupations, and I have done nothing myself of all this I tell you to do.
+But so far as you can work in this manner, even if you only ascertain the
+history of one plant, so that you know that accurately, you will have
+helped to lay the foundation of a true science of botany, from which the
+mass of useless nomenclature,[17] now mistaken for science, will fall away,
+as the husk of a poppy falls from the bursting flower.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{40}
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE LEAF.
+
+1. In the first of the poems of which the English Government has appointed
+a portion to be sung every day for the instruction and pleasure of the
+people, there occurs this curious statement respecting any person who will
+behave himself rightly: "He shall be like a tree planted by the river side,
+that bears its fruit in its season. His leaf also shall not wither; and you
+will see that whatever he does will prosper."
+
+I call it a curious statement, because the conduct to which this prosperity
+is promised is not that which the English, as a nation, at present think
+conducive to prosperity: but whether the statement be true or not, it will
+be easy for you to recollect the two eastern figures under which the
+happiness of the man is represented,--that he is like a tree bearing fruit
+"in its season;" (not so hastily as that the frost pinch it, nor so late
+that no sun ripens it;) and that "his leaf shall not fade." I should like
+you to recollect this phrase in the Vulgate--"folium ejus non
+defluet"--shall not fall _away_,--that is to say, shall not fall so as to
+leave any visible bareness in winter time, but {41} only that others may
+come up in its place, and the tree be always green.
+
+2. Now, you know, the fruit of the tree is either for the continuance of
+its race, or for the good, or harm, of other creatures. In no case is it a
+good to the tree itself. It is not indeed, properly, a part of the tree at
+all, any more than the egg is part of the bird, or the young of any
+creature part of the creature itself. But in the leaf is the strength of
+the tree itself. Nay, rightly speaking, the leaves _are_ the tree itself.
+Its trunk sustains; its fruit burdens and exhausts; but in the leaf it
+breathes and lives. And thus also, in the eastern symbolism, the fruit is
+the labour of men for others; but the leaf is their own life. "He shall
+bring forth fruit, in his time; and his own joy and strength shall be
+continual."
+
+3. Notice next the word 'folium.' In Greek, [Greek: phullon], 'phyllon.'
+
+"The thing that is born," or "put forth." "When the branch is tender, and
+putteth forth her leaves, ye know that summer is nigh." The botanists say,
+"The leaf is an expansion of the bark of the stem." More accurately, the
+bark is a contraction of the tissue of the leaf. For every leaf is born out
+of the earth, and breathes out of the air; and there are many leaves that
+have no stems, but only roots. It is 'the springing thing'; this thin film
+of life; rising, with its _edge_ out of the ground--infinitely feeble,
+infinitely fair. With Folium, in Latin, is rightly associated the word
+Flos; for the flower is only a group of {42} singularly happy leaves. From
+these two roots come foglio, feuille, feuillage, and fleur;--blume,
+blossom, and bloom; our foliage, and the borrowed foil, and the connected
+technical groups of words in architecture and the sciences.
+
+4. This _thin_ film, I said. That is the essential character of a leaf; to
+be thin,--widely spread out in proportion to its mass. It is the opening of
+the substance of the earth to the air, which is the giver of life. The
+Greeks called it, therefore, not only the born or blooming thing, but the
+spread or expanded thing--"[Greek: petalon]." Pindar calls the beginnings
+of quarrel, "petals of quarrel." Recollect, therefore, this form, Petalos;
+and connect it with Petasos, the expanded cap of Mercury. For one great use
+of both is to give shade. The root of all these words is said to be [GREEK:
+PET] (Pet), which may easily be remembered in Greek, as it sometimes occurs
+in no unpleasant sense in English.
+
+5. But the word 'petalos' is connected in Greek with another word, meaning,
+to fly,--so that you may think of a bird as spreading its petals to the
+wind; and with another, signifying Fate in its pursuing flight, the
+overtaking thing, or overflying Fate. Finally, there is another Greek word
+meaning 'wide,' [Greek: platus] (platys); whence at last our 'plate'--a
+thing made broad or extended--but especially made broad or 'flat' out of
+the solid, as in a lump of clay extended on the wheel, or a lump of metal
+extended by the hammer. So the first we call Platter; the second Plate,
+when of the precious metals. Then putting _b_ for {43} _p_, and _d_ for
+_t_, we get the blade of an oar, and blade of grass.
+
+6. Now gather a branch of laurel, and look at it carefully. You may read
+the history of the being of half the earth in one of those green oval
+leaves--the things that the sun and the rivers have made out of dry ground.
+Daphne--daughter of Enipeus, and beloved by the Sun,--that fable gives you
+at once the two great facts about vegetation. Where warmth is, and
+moisture--there, also, the leaf. Where no warmth--there is no leaf; where
+there is no dew--no leaf.
+
+7. Look, then, to the branch you hold in your hand. That you _can_ so hold
+it, or make a crown of it, if you choose, is the first thing I want you to
+note of it;--the proportion of size, namely, between the leaf and _you_.
+Great part of your life and character, as a human creature, has depended on
+that. Suppose all leaves had been spacious, like some palm leaves; solid,
+like cactus stem; or that trees had grown, as they might of course just as
+easily have grown, like mushrooms, all one great cluster of leaf round one
+stalk. I do not say that they are divided into small leaves only for your
+delight, or your service, as if you were the monarch of everything--even in
+this atom of a globe. You are made of your proper size; and the leaves of
+theirs: for reasons, and by laws, of which neither the leaves nor you know
+anything. Only note the harmony between both, and the joy we may have in
+this division and mystery of the frivolous and tremulous petals, {44} which
+break the light and the breeze,--compared to what with the frivolous and
+tremulous mind which is in us, we could have had out of domes, or
+penthouses, or walls of leaf.
+
+8. Secondly; think awhile of its dark clear green, and the good of it to
+you. Scientifically, you know green in leaves is owing to 'chlorophyll,'
+or, in English, to 'greenleaf.' It may be very fine to know that; but my
+advice to you, on the whole, is to rest content with the general fact that
+leaves are green when they do not grow in or near smoky towns; and not by
+any means to rest content with the fact that very soon there will not be a
+green leaf in England, but only greenish-black ones. And thereon resolve
+that you will yourself endeavour to promote the growing of the green wood,
+rather than of the black.
+
+9. Looking at the back of your laurel-leaves, you see how the central rib
+or spine of each, and the lateral branchings, strengthen and carry it. I
+find much confused use, in botanical works, of the words Vein and Rib. For,
+indeed, there are veins _in_ the ribs of leaves, as marrow in bones; and
+the projecting bars often gradually depress themselves into a transparent
+net of rivers. But the _mechanical_ force of the framework in carrying the
+leaf-tissue is the point first to be noticed; it is that which admits,
+regulates, or restrains the visible motions of the leaf; while the system
+of circulation can only be studied through the microscope. But the ribbed
+leaf bears itself to the wind, as the webbed foot of a bird does to the
+{45} water, and needs the same kind, though not the same strength, of
+support; and its ribs always are partly therefore constituted of strong
+woody substance, which is knit out of the tissue; and you can extricate
+this skeleton framework, and keep it, after the leaf-tissue is dissolved.
+So I shall henceforward speak simply of the leaf and its ribs,--only
+specifying the additional veined structure on necessary occasions.
+
+10. I have just said that the ribs--and might have said, farther, the stalk
+that sustains them--are knit out of the _tissue_ of the leaf. But what is
+the leaf tissue itself knit out of? One would think that was nearly the
+first thing to be discovered, or at least to be thought of, concerning
+plants,--namely, how and of what they are made. We say they 'grow.' But you
+know that they can't grow out of nothing;--this solid wood and rich tracery
+must be made out of some previously existing substance. What is the
+substance?--and how is it woven into leaves.--twisted into wood?
+
+11. Consider how fast this is done, in spring. You walk in February over a
+slippery field, where, through hoar-frost and mud, you perhaps hardly see
+the small green blades of trampled turf. In twelve weeks you wade through
+the same field up to your knees in fresh grass; and in a week or two more,
+you mow two or three solid haystacks off it. In winter you walk by your
+currant-bush, or your vine. They are shrivelled sticks--like bits of black
+tea in the canister. You pass again in May, and {46} the currant-bush looks
+like a young sycamore tree; and the vine is a bower: and meanwhile the
+forests, all over this side of the round world, have grown their foot or
+two in height, with new leaves--so much deeper, so much denser than they
+were. Where has it all come from? Cut off the fresh shoots from a single
+branch of any tree in May. Weigh them; and then consider that so much
+weight has been added to every such living branch, everywhere, this side
+the equator, within the last two months. What is all that made of?
+
+12. Well, this much the botanists really know, and tell us,--It is made
+chiefly of the breath of animals: that is to say, of the substance which,
+during the past year, animals have breathed into the air; and which, if
+they went on breathing, and their breath were not made into trees, would
+poison them, or rather suffocate them, as people are suffocated in
+uncleansed pits, and dogs in the Grotta del Cane. So that you may look upon
+the grass and forests of the earth as a kind of green hoar-frost, frozen
+upon it from our breath, as, on the window-panes, the white arborescence of
+ice.
+
+13. But how is it made into wood?
+
+The substances that have been breathed into the air are charcoal, with
+oxygen and hydrogen,--or, more plainly, charcoal and water. Some necessary
+earths,--in smaller quantity, but absolutely essential,--the trees get from
+the ground; but, I believe all the charcoal they want, and most of the
+water, from the air. Now the question is, where and how do they take it in,
+and digest it into wood? {47}
+
+14. You know, in spring, and partly through all the year, except in frost,
+a liquid called 'sap' circulates in trees, of which the nature, one should
+have thought, might have been ascertained by mankind in the six thousand
+years they have been cutting wood. Under the impression always that it _had
+been_ ascertained, and that I could at any time know all about it, I have
+put off till to-day, 19th October, 1869, when I am past fifty, the knowing
+anything about it at all. But I will really endeavour now to ascertain
+something, and take to my botanical books, accordingly, in due order.
+
+(1) Dresser's "Rudiments of Botany." 'Sap' not in the index; only Samara,
+and Sarcocarp,--about neither of which I feel the smallest curiosity. (2)
+Figuier's "Histoire des Plantes."[18] 'Seve,' not in index; only Serpolet,
+and Sherardia arvensis, which also have no help in them for me. (3)
+Balfour's "Manual of Botany." 'Sap,'--yes, at last. "Article 257. Course of
+fluids in exogenous stems." I don't care about the course just now: I want
+to know where the fluids come from. "If a plant be plunged into a weak
+solution of acetate of lead,"--I don't in the least want to know what
+happens. "From the minuteness of the tissue, it is not easy to determine
+the vessels through which the sap moves." Who said it was? If it had been
+easy, I should have done it myself. "Changes take place in the composition
+of the {48} sap in its upward course." I dare say; but I don't know yet
+what its composition is before it begins going up. "The Elaborated Sap by
+Mr. Schultz has been called 'latex.'" I wish Mr. Schultz were in a hogshead
+of it, with the top on. "On account of these movements in the latex, the
+laticiferous vessels have been denominated cinenchymatous." I do not
+venture to print the expressions which I here mentally make use of.
+
+15. Stay,--here, at last, in Article 264, is something to the purpose: "It
+appears then that, in the case of Exogenous plants, the fluid matter in the
+soil, containing different substances in solution, is sucked up by the
+extremities of the roots." Yes, but how of the pine trees on yonder
+rock?--Is there any sap in the rock, or water either? The moisture must be
+seized during actual rain on the root, or stored up from the snow; stored
+up, any way, in a tranquil, not actively sappy, state, till the time comes
+for its change, of which there is no account here.
+
+16. I have only one chance left now. Lindley's "Introduction to Botany."
+'Sap,'--yes,--'General motion of.' II. 325. "The course which is taken by
+the sap, after entering a plant, is the first subject for consideration."
+My dear doctor, I have learned nearly whatever I know of plant structure
+from you, and am grateful; and that it is little, is not your fault, but
+mine. But this--let me say it with all sincere respect--is not what you
+should have told me here. You know, far better than I, that 'sap' never
+does enter a plant at all; but only salt, or earth and water, {49} and that
+the roots alone could not make it; and that, therefore, the course of it
+must be, in great part, the result or process of the actual making. But I
+will read now, patiently; for I know you will tell me much that is worth
+hearing, though not perhaps what I want.
+
+Yes; now that I have read Lindley's statement carefully, I find it is full
+of precious things; and this is what, with thinking over it, I can gather
+for you.
+
+17. First, towards the end of January,--as the light enlarges, and the
+trees revive from their rest,--there is a general liquefaction of the blood
+of St. Januarius in their stems; and I suppose there is really a great deal
+of moisture rapidly absorbed from the earth in most cases; and that this
+absorption is a great help to the sun in drying the winter's damp out of it
+for us: then, with that strange vital power,--which scientific people are
+usually as afraid of naming as common people are afraid of naming
+Death,--the tree gives the gathered earth and water a changed existence;
+and to this new-born liquid an upward motion from the earth, as our blood
+has from the heart; for the life of the tree is out of the earth; and this
+upward motion has a mechanical power in pushing on the growth. "_Forced
+onward_ by the current of sap, the plumule ascends," (Lindley, p.
+132,)--this blood of the tree having to supply, exactly as our own blood
+has, not only the forming powers of substance, but a continual evaporation,
+"approximately seventeen times more than that of the human body," while the
+force of motion in the sap "is {50} sometimes five times greater than that
+which impels the blood in the crural artery of the horse."
+
+18. Hence generally, I think we may conclude thus much,--that at every pore
+of its surface, under ground and above, the plant in the spring absorbs
+moisture, which instantly disperses itself through its whole system "by
+means of some permeable quality of the membranes of the cellular tissue
+invisible to our eyes even by the most powerful glasses" (p. 326); that in
+this way subjected to the vital power of the tree, it becomes sap, properly
+so called, which passes downwards through this cellular tissue, slowly and
+secretly; and then upwards, through the great vessels of the tree,
+violently, stretching out the supple twigs of it as yon see a flaccid
+waterpipe swell and move when the cock is turned to fill it. And the tree
+becomes literally a fountain, of which the springing streamlets are clothed
+with new-woven garments of green tissue, and of which the silver spray
+stays in the sky,--a spray, now, of leaves.
+
+19. That is the gist of the matter; and a very wonderful gist it is, to my
+mind. The secret and subtle descent--the violent and exulting resilience of
+the tree's blood,--what guides it?--what compels? The creature has no heart
+to beat like ours; one cannot take refuge from the mystery in a 'muscular
+contraction.' Fountain without supply--playing by its own force, for ever
+rising and falling all through the days of Spring, spending itself at last
+in gathered clouds of leaves, and iris of blossom.
+
+Very wonderful; and it seems, for the present, that {51} we know nothing
+whatever about its causes;--nay, the strangeness of the reversed arterial
+and vein motion, without a heart, does not seem to strike anybody. Perhaps,
+however, it may interest you, as I observe it does the botanists, to know
+that the cellular tissue through which the motion is effected is called
+Parenchym, and the woody tissue, Bothrenchym; and that Parenchym is
+divided, by a system of nomenclature which "has some advantages over that
+more commonly in use,"[19] into merenchyma, conenchyma, ovenchyma,
+atractenchyma, cylindrenchyma, colpenchyma, cladenchyma, and prismenchyma.
+
+20. Take your laurel branch into your hand again. There are, as you must
+well know, innumerable shapes and orders of leaves;--there are some like
+claws; some like fingers, and some like feet; there are endlessly cleft
+ones, and endlessly clustered ones, and inscrutable divisions within
+divisions of the fretted verdure; and wrinkles, and ripples, and
+stitchings, and hemmings, and pinchings, and gatherings, and crumplings,
+and clippings, and what not. But there is nothing so constantly noble as
+the pure leaf of the laurel, bay, orange, and olive; numerable, sequent,
+perfect in setting, divinely simple and serene. I shall call these noble
+leaves 'Apolline' leaves. They characterize many orders of plants, great
+and small,--from the magnolia to the myrtle, and exquisite 'myrtille' {52}
+of the hills, (bilberry); but wherever you find them, strong, lustrous,
+dark green, simply formed, richly scented or stored,--you have nearly
+always kindly and lovely vegetation, in healthy ground and air.
+
+21. The gradual diminution in rank beneath the Apolline leaf, takes place
+in others by the loss of one or more of the qualities above named. The
+Apolline leaf, I said, is strong, lustrous, full in its green, rich in
+substance, simple in form. The inferior leaves are those which have lost
+strength, and become thin, like paper; which have lost lustre, and become
+dead by roughness of surface, like the nettle,--(an Apolline leaf may
+become dead by _bloom_, like the olive, yet not lose beauty); which have
+lost colour and become feeble in green, as in the poplar, or _crudely_
+bright, like rice; which have lost substance and softness, and have nothing
+to give in scent or nourishment; or become flinty or spiny; finally, which
+have lost simplicity, and become cloven or jagged. Many of these losses are
+partly atoned for by gain of some peculiar loveliness. Grass and moss, and
+parsley and fern, have each their own delightfulness; yet they are all of
+inferior power and honour, compared to the Apolline leaves.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 3.]
+
+22. You see, however, that though your laurel leaf has a central stem, and
+traces of ribs branching from it, in a vertebrated manner, they are so
+faint that we cannot take it for a type of vertebrate structure. But the
+two figures of elm and alisma leaf, given in Modern Painters (vol. iii.),
+and now here repeated, Fig. 3, will clearly enough {53} show the opposition
+between this vertebrate form, branching again usually at the edges, _a_,
+and the softly opening lines diffused at the stem, and gathered at the
+point of the leaf _b_, which, as you almost without doubt know already are
+characteristic of a vast group of plants, including especially all the
+lilies, grasses, and palms, which for the most part are the signs of local
+or temporary moisture in hot countries;--local, as of fountains and
+streams; temporary, as of rain or inundation.
+
+But temporary, still more definitely in the day, than in the year. When you
+go out, delighted, into the dew of the morning, have you ever considered
+why it is so rich upon the grass;--why it is _not_ upon the trees? It _is_
+partly on the trees, but yet your memory of it will be always chiefly of
+its gleam upon the lawn. On many {54} trees you will find there is none at
+all. I cannot follow out here the many inquiries connected with this
+subject, but, broadly, remember the branched trees are fed chiefly by
+rain,--the unbranched ones by dew, visible or invisible; that is to say, at
+all events by moisture which they can gather for themselves out of the air;
+or else by streams and springs. Hence the division of the verse of the song
+of Moses: "My doctrine shall drop as the rain; my speech shall distil as
+the dew: as the _small_ rain upon the tender _herb_, and as the showers
+upon the grass."
+
+23. Next, examining the direction of the veins in the leaf of the alisma,
+_b_, Fig. 3, you see they all open widely, as soon as they can, towards the
+thick part of the leaf; and then taper, apparently with reluctance, pushing
+each other outwards, to the point. If the leaf were a lake of the same
+shape, and its stem the entering river, the lines of the currents passing
+through it would, I believe, be nearly the same as that of the veins in the
+aquatic leaf. I have not examined the fluid law accurately, and I do not
+suppose there is more real correspondence than may be caused by the leaf's
+expanding in every permitted direction, as the water would, with all the
+speed it can; but the resemblance is so close as to enable you to fasten
+the relation of the unbranched leaves to streams more distinctly in your
+mind,--just as the toss of the palm leaves from their stem may, I think, in
+their likeness to the springing of a fountain, remind you of their relation
+to the desert, and their necessity, therein, to life of man and beast. {55}
+
+24. And thus, associating these grass and lily leaves always with
+fountains, or with dew, I think we may get a pretty general name for them
+also. You know that Cora, our Madonna of the flowers, was lost in Sicilian
+Fields: you know, also, that the fairest of Greek fountains, lost in
+Greece, was thought to rise in a Sicilian islet; and that the real
+springing of the noble fountain in that rock was one of the causes which
+determined the position of the greatest Greek city of Sicily. So I think,
+as we call the fairest branched leaves 'Apolline,' we will call the fairest
+flowing ones 'Arethusan.' But remember that the Apolline leaf represents
+only the central type of land leaves, and is, within certain limits, of a
+fixed form; while the beautiful Arethusan leaves, alike in flowing of their
+lines, change their forms indefinitely,--some shaped like round pools, and
+some like winding currents, and many like arrows, and many like hearts, and
+otherwise varied and variable, as leaves ought to be,--that rise out of the
+waters, and float amidst the pausing of their foam.
+
+25. Brantwood, _Easter Day_, 1875.--I don't like to spoil my pretty
+sentence, above; but on reading it over, I suspect I wrote it confusing the
+water-lily leaf, and other floating ones of the same kind, with the
+Arethusan forms. But the water-lily and water-ranunculus leaves, and such
+others, are to the orders of earth-loving leaves what ducks and swans are
+to birds; (the swan is the water-lily of birds;) they are _swimming_
+leaves; not properly watery creatures, or able to live under water like
+fish, (unless {56} when dormant), but just like birds that pass their lives
+on the surface of the waves--though they must breathe in the air.
+
+And these natant leaves, as they lie on the water surface, do not want
+strong ribs to carry them,[20] but have very delicate ones beautifully
+branching into the orbed space, to keep the tissue nice and flat; while, on
+the other hand, leaves that really have to grow under water, sacrifice
+their tissue, and keep only their ribs, like coral animals; ('Ranunculus
+heterophyllus,' 'other-leaved Frog-flower,' and its like,) just as, if you
+keep your own hands too long in water, they shrivel at the finger-ends.
+
+26. So that you must not attach any great botanical importance to the
+characters of contrasted aspects in leaves, which I wish you to express by
+the words 'Apolline' and 'Arethusan'; but their mythic importance is very
+great, and your careful observance of it will help you completely to
+understand the beautiful Greek fable of Apollo and Daphne. There are indeed
+several Daphnes, and the first root of the name is far away in another
+field of thought altogether, connected with the Gods of Light. But
+etymology, the best of servants, is an unreasonable master; and Professor
+Max Mueller trusts his deep-reaching knowledge of the first ideas connected
+with the names of Athena {57} and Daphne, too implicitly, when he supposes
+this idea to be retained in central Greek theology. 'Athena' originally
+meant only the dawn, among nations who knew nothing of a Sacred Spirit. But
+the Athena who catches Achilles by the hair, and urges the spear of Diomed,
+has not, in the mind of Homer, the slightest remaining connection with the
+mere beauty of daybreak. Daphne chased by Apollo, may perhaps--though I
+doubt even this much of consistence in the earlier myth--have meant the
+Dawn pursued by the Sun. But there is no trace whatever of this first idea
+left in the fable of Arcadia and Thessaly.
+
+27. The central Greek Daphne is the daughter of one of the great _river_
+gods of Arcadia; her mother is the Earth. Now Arcadia is the Oberland of
+Greece; and the crests of Cyllene, Erymanthus, and Maenalus[21] surround it,
+like the Swiss forest cantons, with walls of rock, and shadows of pine. And
+it divides itself, like the Oberland, into three regions: first, the region
+of rock and snow, sacred to Mercury and Apollo, in which Mercury's birth on
+Cyllene, his construction of the lyre, and his stealing the oxen of Apollo,
+are all expressions of the enchantments of cloud and sound, mingling with
+the sunshine, on the cliffs of Cyllene.
+
+                 "While the mists
+  Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes
+  {58}
+  And phantoms from the crags and solid earth
+  As fast as a musician scatters sounds
+  Out of his instrument."
+
+Then came the pine region, sacred especially to Pan and Maenalus, the son of
+Lycaon and brother of Callisto; and you had better remember this
+relationship carefully, for the sake of the meaning of the constellations
+of Ursa Major and the Mons Maenalius, and of their wolf and bear traditions;
+(compare also the strong impression on the Greek mind of the wild
+leafiness, nourished by snow, of the Boeotian Cithaeron,--"Oh, thou
+lake-hollow, full of divine leaves, and of wild creatures, nurse of the
+snow, darling of Diana," (Phoenissae, 801)). How wild the climate of this
+pine region is, you may judge from the pieces in the note below[22] out of
+Colonel Leake's diary in {59} crossing the Maenalian range in spring. And
+then, lastly, you have the laurel and vine region, full of sweetness and
+Elysian beauty.
+
+28. Now as Mercury is the ruling power of the hill enchantment, so Daphne
+of the leafy peace. She is, in her first life, the daughter of the mountain
+river, the mist of it filling the valley; the Sun, pursuing, and effacing
+it, from dell to dell, is, literally, Apollo pursuing Daphne, and _adverse_
+to her; (not, as in the earlier tradition, the Sun pursuing only his own
+light). Daphne, thus hunted, cries to her mother, the Earth, which opens,
+and receives her, causing the laurel to spring up in her stead. That is to
+say, wherever the rocks protect the mist from the sunbeam, and suffer it to
+water the earth, there the laurel and other richest vegetation fill the
+hollows, giving a better glory to the sun itself. For sunshine, on the
+torrent spray, {60} on the grass of its valley, and entangled among the
+laurel stems, or glancing from their leaves, became a thousandfold lovelier
+and more sacred than the same sunbeams, burning on the leafless
+mountain-side.
+
+And farther, the leaf, in its connection with the river, is typically
+expressive, not, as the flower was, of human fading and passing away, but
+of the perpetual flow and renewal of human mind and thought, rising "like
+the rivers that run among the hills"; therefore it was that the youth of
+Greece sacrificed their hair--the sign of their continually renewed
+strength,--to the rivers, and to Apollo. Therefore, to commemorate Apollo's
+own chief victory over death--over Python, the corrupter,--a laurel branch
+was gathered every ninth year in the vale of Tempe; and the laurel leaf
+became the reward or crown of all beneficent and enduring work of man--work
+of inspiration, born of the strength of the earth, and of the dew of
+heaven, and which can never pass away.
+
+29. You may doubt at first, even because of its grace, this meaning in the
+fable of Apollo and Daphne; you will not doubt it, however, when you trace
+it back to its first eastern origin. When we speak carelessly of the
+traditions respecting the Garden of Eden, (or in Hebrew, remember, Garden
+of Delight,) we are apt to confuse Milton's descriptions with those in the
+book of Genesis. Milton fills his Paradise with flowers; but no flowers are
+spoken of in Genesis. We may indeed conclude that in speaking of every herb
+of the field, flowers are included. But they {61} are not named. The things
+that are _named_ in the Garden of Delight are trees only.
+
+The words are, "every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for
+food;" and as if to mark the idea more strongly for us in the Septuagint,
+even the ordinary Greek word for tree is not used, but the word [Greek:
+xulon],--literally, every 'wood,' every piece of _timber_ that was pleasant
+or good. They are indeed the "vivi travi,"--living rafters, of Dante's
+Apennine.
+
+Do you remember how those trees were said to be watered? Not by the four
+rivers only. The rivers could not supply the place of rain. No rivers do;
+for in truth they are the refuse of rain. No storm-clouds were there, nor
+hidings of the blue by darkening veil; but there went up a _mist_ from the
+earth, and watered the face of the ground,--or, as in Septuagint and
+Vulgate, "There went forth a fountain from the earth, and gave the earth to
+drink."
+
+30. And now, lastly, we continually think of that Garden of Delight, as if
+it existed, or could exist, no longer; wholly forgetting that it is spoken
+of in Scripture as perpetually existent; and some of its fairest trees as
+existent also, or only recently destroyed. When Ezekiel is describing to
+Pharaoh the greatness of the Assyrians, do you remember what image he gives
+of them? "Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon, with fair branches;
+and his top was among the thick boughs; the waters nourished him, and the
+deep brought him up, with her rivers {62} running round about his plants.
+Under his branches did all the beasts of the field bring forth their young;
+and under his shadow dwelt all great nations."
+
+31. Now hear what follows. "The cedars _in the Garden of God_ could not
+hide _him_. The fir trees were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees
+were not like his branches; nor any tree in the Garden of God was like unto
+him in beauty."
+
+So that you see, whenever a nation rises into consistent, vital, and,
+through many generations, enduring power, _there_ is still the Garden of
+God; still it is the water of life which feeds the roots of it; and still
+the succession of its people is imaged by the perennial leafage of trees of
+Paradise. Could this be said of Assyria, and shall it not be said of
+England? How much more, of lives such as ours should be,--just, laborious,
+united in aim, beneficent in fulfilment, may the image be used of the
+leaves of the trees of Eden! Other symbols have been given often to show
+the evanescence and slightness of our lives--the foam upon the water, the
+grass on the housetop, the vapour that vanishes away; yet none of these are
+images of true human life. That life, when it is real, is _not_ evanescent;
+is _not_ slight; does _not_ vanish away. Every noble life leaves the fibre
+of it interwoven for ever in the work of the world; by so much, evermore,
+the strength of the human race has gained; more stubborn in the root,
+higher towards heaven in the branch; and, "as a teil tree, and as an
+oak,--whose substance is in them {63} when they cast their leaves,--so the
+holy seed is in the midst thereof."
+
+32. Only remember on what conditions. In the great Psalm of life, we are
+told that everything that a man doeth shall prosper, so only that he
+delight in the law of his God, that he hath not walked in the counsel of
+the wicked, nor sat in the seat of the scornful. Is it among these leaves
+of the perpetual Spring,--helpful leaves for the healing of the
+nations,--that we mean to have our part and place, or rather among the
+"brown skeletons of leaves that lag, the forest brook along"? For other
+leaves there are, and other streams that water them,--not water of life,
+but water of Acheron. Autumnal leaves there are that strew the brooks, in
+Vallombrosa. Remember you how the name of the place was changed: "Once
+called 'Sweet water' (Aqua bella), now, the Shadowy Vale." Portion in one
+or other name we must choose, all of us,--with the living olive, by the
+living fountains of waters, or with the wild fig trees, whose leafage of
+human soul is strewed along the brooks of death, in the eternal
+Vallombrosa.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{64}
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE FLOWER.
+
+ROME, _Whit Monday, 1874_.
+
+1. On the quiet road leading from under the Palatine to the little church
+of St. Nereo and Achilleo, I met, yesterday morning, group after group of
+happy peasants heaped in pyramids on their triumphal carts, in Whit-Sunday
+dress, stout and clean, and gay in colour; and the women all with bright
+artificial roses in their hair, set with true natural taste, and well
+becoming them. This power of arranging wreath or crown of flowers for the
+head, remains to the people from classic times. And the thing that struck
+me most in the look of it was not so much the cheerfulness, as the
+dignity;--in a true sense, the _becomingness_ and decorousness of the
+ornament. Among the ruins of the dead city, and the worse desolation of the
+work of its modern rebuilders, here was one element at least of honour, and
+order;--and, in these, of delight.
+
+And these are the real significances of the flower itself. It is the utmost
+purification of the plant, and the utmost discipline. Where its tissue is
+blanched fairest, dyed purest, set in strictest rank, appointed to most
+chosen office, {65} there--and created by the fact of this purity and
+function--is the flower.
+
+2. But created, observe, by the purity and order, more than by the
+function. The flower exists for its own sake,--not for the fruit's sake.
+The production of the fruit is an added honour to it--is a granted
+consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the
+seed,--not the seed of the flower. You are fond of cherries, perhaps; and
+think that the use of cherry blossom is to produce cherries. Not at all.
+The use of cherries is to produce cherry blossoms; just as the use of bulbs
+is to produce hyacinths,--not of hyacinths to produce bulbs. Nay, that the
+flower can multiply by bulb, or root, or slip, as well as by seed, may show
+you at once how immaterial the seed-forming function is to the flower's
+existence. A flower is to the vegetable substance what a crystal is to the
+mineral. "Dust of sapphire," writes my friend Dr. John Brown to me, of the
+wood hyacinths of Scotland in the spring. Yes, that is so,--each bud more
+beautiful, itself, than perfectest jewel--_this_, indeed, jewel "of purest
+ray serene;" but, observe you, the glory is in the purity, the serenity,
+the radiance,--not in the mere continuance of the creature.
+
+3. It is because of its beauty that its continuance is worth Heaven's
+while. The glory of it is in being,--not in begetting; and in the spirit
+and substance,--not the change. For the earth also has its flesh and
+spirit. Every day of spring is the earth's Whit Sunday--Fire {66} Sunday.
+The falling fire of the rainbow, with the order of its zones, and the
+gladness of its covenant,--you may eat of it, like Esdras; but you feed
+upon it only that you may see it. Do you think that flowers were born to
+nourish the blind?
+
+Fasten well in your mind, then, the conception of order, and purity, as the
+essence of the flower's being, no less than of the crystal's. A ruby is not
+made bright to scatter round it child-rubies; nor a flower, but in
+collateral and added honour, to give birth to other flowers.
+
+Two main facts, then, you have to study in every flower: the symmetry or
+order of it, and the perfection of its substance; first, the manner in
+which the leaves are placed for beauty of form; then the spinning and
+weaving and blanching of their tissue, for the reception of purest colour,
+or refining to richest surface.
+
+4. First, the order: the proportion, and answering to each other, of the
+parts; for the study of which it becomes necessary to know what its parts
+are; and that a flower consists essentially of--Well, I really don't know
+what it consists essentially of. For some flowers have bracts, and stalks,
+and toruses, and calices, and corollas, and discs, and stamens, and
+pistils, and ever so many odds and ends of things besides, of no use at
+all, seemingly; and others have no bracts, and no stalks, and no toruses,
+and no calices, and no corollas, and nothing recognizable for stamens or
+pistils,--only, when they come to be reduced to this kind of poverty, one
+doesn't call {67} them flowers; they get together in knots, and one calls
+them catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence altogether;--I
+haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, what an oak blossom is like;
+only I know its bracts get together and make a cup of themselves
+afterwards, which the Italians call, as they do the dome of St. Peter's,
+'cupola'; and that it is a great pity, for their own sake as well as the
+world's, that they were not content with their ilex cupolas, which were
+made to hold something, but took to building these big ones upside-down,
+which hold nothing--_less_ than nothing,--large extinguishers of the flame
+of Catholic religion. And for farther embarrassment, a flower not only is
+without essential consistence of a given number of parts, but it rarely
+consists, alone, of _itself_. One talks of a hyacinth as of a flower; but a
+hyacinth is any number of flowers. One does not talk of 'a heather'; when
+one says 'heath,' one means the whole plant, not the blossom,--because
+heath-bells, though they grow together for company's sake, do so in a
+voluntary sort of way, and are not fixed in their places; and yet, they
+depend on each other for effect, as much as a bunch of grapes.
+
+5. And this grouping of flowers, more or less waywardly, is the most subtle
+part of their order, and the most difficult to represent. Take that cluster
+of bog-heather bells, for instance, Line-study 1. You might think at first
+there were no lines in it worth study; but look at it more carefully. There
+are twelve bells in the {68} cluster. There may be fewer, or more; but the
+bog-heath is apt to run into something near that number. They all grow
+together as close as they can, and on one side of the supporting branch
+only. The natural effect would be to bend the branch down; but the branch
+won't have that, and so leans back to carry them. Now you see the use of
+drawing the profile in the middle figure: it shows you the exactly balanced
+setting of the group,--not drooping, nor erect; but with a disposition to
+droop, tossed up by the leaning back of the stem. Then, growing as near as
+they can to each other, those in the middle get squeezed. Here is another
+quite special character. Some flowers don't like being squeezed at all
+(fancy a squeezed convolvulus!); but these heather bells like it, and look
+all the prettier for it,--not the squeezed ones exactly, by themselves, but
+the cluster altogether, by their patience.
+
+Then also the outside ones get pushed into a sort of star-shape, and in
+front show the colour of all their sides, and at the back the rich green
+cluster of sharp leaves that hold them; all this order being as essential
+to the plant as any of the more formal structures of the bell itself.
+
+6. But the bog-heath has usually only one cluster of flowers to arrange on
+each branch. Take a spray of ling (Frontispiece), and you will find that
+the richest piece of Gothic spire-sculpture would be dull and graceless
+beside the grouping of the floral masses in their various life. But it is
+difficult to give the accuracy of attention {69} necessary to see their
+beauty without drawing them; and still more difficult to draw them in any
+approximation to the truth before they change. This is indeed the fatallest
+obstacle to all good botanical work. Flowers, or leaves,--and especially
+the last,--can only be rightly drawn as they grow. And even then, in their
+loveliest spring action, they grow as you draw them, and will not stay
+quite the same creatures for half an hour.
+
+7. I said in my inaugural lectures at Oxford, Sec. 107, that real botany is
+not so much the description of plants as their biography. Without entering
+at all into the history of its fruitage, the life and death of the blossom
+_itself_ is always an eventful romance, which must be completely told, if
+well. The grouping given to the various states of form between bud and
+flower is always the most important part of the design of the plant; and in
+the modes of its death are some of the most touching lessons, or
+symbolisms, connected with its existence. The utter loss and far-scattered
+ruin of the cistus and wild rose,--the dishonoured and dark contortion of
+the convolvulus,--the pale wasting of the crimson heath of Apennine, are
+strangely opposed by the quiet closing of the brown bells of the ling, each
+making of themselves a little cross as they die; and so enduring into the
+days of winter. I have drawn the faded beside the full branch, and know not
+which is the more beautiful.
+
+8. This grouping, then, and way of treating each other in their gathered
+company, is the first and most subtle {70} condition of form in flowers;
+and, observe, I don't mean, just now, the appointed and disciplined
+grouping, but the wayward and accidental. Don't confuse the beautiful
+consent of the cluster in these sprays of heath with the legal strictness
+of a foxglove,--though that also has its divinity; but of another kind.
+That legal order of blossoming--for which we may wisely keep the accepted
+name, 'inflorescence,'--is itself quite a separate subject of study, which
+we cannot take up until we know the still more strict laws which are set
+over the flower itself.
+
+9. I have in my hand a small red poppy which I gathered on Whit Sunday on
+the palace of the Caesars. It is an intensely simple, intensely floral,
+flower. All silk and flame: a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen
+among the wild grass far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven's
+altars. You cannot have a more complete, a more stainless, type of flower
+absolute; inside and outside, _all_ flower. No sparing of colour
+anywhere--no outside coarsenesses--no interior secrecies; open as the
+sunshine that creates it; fine-finished on both sides, down to the
+extremest point of insertion on its narrow stalk; and robed in the purple
+of the Caesars.
+
+Literally so. That poppy scarlet, so far as it could be painted by mortal
+hand, for mortal King, stays yet, against the sun, and wind, and rain, on
+the walls of the house of Augustus, a hundred yards from the spot where I
+gathered the weed of its desolation.
+
+10. A pure _cup_, you remember it is; that much at least {71} you cannot
+but remember, of poppy-form among the cornfields; and it is best, in
+beginning, to think of every flower as essentially a cup. There are flat
+ones, but you will find that most of these are really groups of flowers,
+not single blossoms; and there are out-of-the-way and quaint ones, very
+difficult to define as of any shape; but even these have a cup to begin
+with, deep down in them. You had better take the idea of a cup or vase, as
+the first, simplest, and most general form of true flower.
+
+The botanists call it a corolla, which means a garland, or a kind of crown;
+and the word is a very good one, because it indicates that the flower-cup
+is made, as our clay cups are, on a potter's wheel; that it is essentially
+a _revolute_ form--a whirl or (botanically) 'whorl' of leaves; in reality
+successive round the base of the urn they form.
+
+11. Perhaps, however, you think poppies in general are not much like cups.
+But the flower in my hand is a--poverty-_stricken_ poppy, I was going to
+write,--poverty-_strengthened_ poppy, I mean. On richer ground, it would
+have gushed into flaunting breadth of untenable purple--flapped its
+inconsistent scarlet vaguely to the wind--dropped the pride of its petals
+over my hand in an hour after I gathered it. But this little rough-bred
+thing, a Campagna pony of a poppy, is as bright and strong to-day as
+yesterday. So that I can see exactly where the leaves join or lap over each
+other; and when I look down into the cup, find it to be composed of four
+leaves altogether,--two smaller, set within two larger. {72}
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
+
+12. Thus far (and somewhat farther) I had written in Rome; but now, putting
+my work together in Oxford, a sudden doubt troubles me, whether all poppies
+have two petals smaller than the other two. Whereupon I take down an
+excellent little school-book on botany--the best I've yet found, thinking
+to be told quickly; and I find a great deal about opium; and, apropos of
+opium, that the juice of common celandine is of a bright orange colour; and
+I pause for a bewildered five minutes, wondering if a celandine is a poppy,
+and how many petals _it_ has: going on again--because I must, without
+making up my mind, on either question--I am told to "observe the floral
+receptacle of the Californian genus Eschscholtzia." Now I can't observe
+anything of the sort, and I don't want to; and I wish California and all
+that's in it were at the deepest bottom of the Pacific. Next I am told to
+compare the poppy and waterlily; and I can't do that, neither--though I
+should like to; and there's the end of the article; and it never tells me
+whether one pair of petals is always smaller than the other, or not. Only I
+see it says the corolla has four petals. Perhaps a celandine may be a
+double poppy, and have eight, I know they're tiresome irregular things, and
+I mustn't be stopped by them;[23]--at {73} any rate, my Roman poppy knew
+what it was about, and had its two couples of leaves in clear
+subordination, of which at the time I went on to inquire farther, as
+follows.
+
+13. The next point is, what shape are the petals of? And that is easier
+asked than answered; for when you pull them off, you find they won't lie
+flat, by any means, but are each of them cups, or rather shells,
+themselves; and that it requires as much conchology as would describe a
+cockle, before you can properly give account of a single poppy leaf. Or of
+a single _any_ leaf--for all leaves are either shells, or boats, (or solid,
+if not hollow, masses,) and cannot be represented in flat outline. But,
+laying these as flat as they will lie on a sheet of paper, you will find
+the piece they hide of the paper they lie on can be drawn; giving
+approximately the shape of the outer leaf as at A, that of the inner as at
+B, Fig. 4; which you will find very difficult lines to draw, for they are
+each composed of two curves, joined, as in Fig. 5; all above the line _a b_
+being the outer edge of the leaf, but joined so subtly to the side that the
+least break in drawing the line spoils the form.
+
+14. Now every flower petal consists essentially of these two parts,
+variously proportioned and outlined. It {74} expands from C to _a b_; and
+closes in the external line, and for this reason.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
+
+Considering every flower under the type of a cup, the first part of the
+petal is that in which it expands from the bottom to the rim; the second
+part, that in which it terminates itself on reaching the rim. Thus let the
+three circles, A B C, Fig 6., represent the undivided cups of the three
+great geometrical orders of flowers--trefoil, quatrefoil and cinquefoil.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
+
+Draw in the first an equilateral triangle, in the second a square, in the
+third a pentagon; draw the dark lines from centres to angles; (D E F): then
+(_a_) the third part of D; (_b_) the fourth part of E, (_c_) the fifth part
+of F, are the normal outline forms of the petals of the three {75}
+families; the relations between the developing angle and limiting curve
+being varied according to the depth of cup, and the degree of connection
+between the petals. Thus a rose folds them over one another, in the bud; a
+convolvulus twists them,--the one expanding into a flat cinquefoil of
+separate petals, and the other into a deep-welled cinquefoil of connected
+ones.
+
+I find an excellent illustration in Veronica Polita, one of the most
+perfectly graceful of field plants because of the light alternate flower
+stalks, each with its leaf at the base; the flower itself a quatrefoil, of
+which the largest and least petals are uppermost. Pull one off its calyx
+(draw, if you can, the outline of the striped blue upper petal with the
+jagged edge of pale gold below), and then examine the relative shapes of
+the lateral, and least upper {76} petal. Their under surface is very
+curious, as if covered with white paint; the blue stripes above, in the
+direction of their growth, deepening the more delicate colour with
+exquisite insistence.
+
+A lilac blossom will give you a pretty example of the expansion of the
+petals of a quatrefoil above the edge of the cup or tube; but I must get
+back to our poppy at present.
+
+15. What outline its petals really have, however, is little shown in their
+crumpled fluttering; but that very crumpling arises from a fine floral
+character which we do not enough value in them. We usually think of the
+poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of
+all the blossoms of the field. The rest--nearly all of them--depend on the
+_texture_ of their surfaces for colour. But the poppy is painted _glass_;
+it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it
+is seen--against the light or with the light--always, it is a flame, and
+warms the wind like a blown ruby.
+
+In these two qualities, the accurately balanced form, and the perfectly
+infused colour of the petals, you have, as I said, the central being of the
+flower. All the other parts of it are necessary, but we must follow them
+out in order.
+
+16. Looking down into the cup, you see the green boss divided by a black
+star,--of six rays only,--and surrounded by a few black spots. My
+rough-nurtured poppy contents itself with these for its centre; a rich one
+would have had the green boss divided by a dozen of rays, and surrounded by
+a dark crowd of crested threads. {77}
+
+This green boss is called by botanists the pistil, which word consists of
+the two first syllables of the Latin pistillum, otherwise more familiarly
+Englished into 'pestle.' The meaning of the botanical word is of course,
+also, that the central part of a flower-cup has to it something of the
+relations that a pestle has to a mortar! Practically, however, as this
+pestle has no pounding functions, I think the word is misleading as well as
+ungraceful; and that we may find a better one after looking a little closer
+into the matter. For this pestle is divided generally into three very
+distinct parts: there is a storehouse at the bottom of it for the seeds of
+the plant; above this, a shaft, often of considerable length in deep cups,
+rising to the level of their upper edge, or above it; and at the top of
+these shafts an expanded crest. This shaft the botanists call 'style,' from
+the Greek word for a pillar; and the crest of it--I do not know
+why--stigma, from the Greek word for 'spot.' The storehouse for the seeds
+they call the 'ovary,' from the Latin ovum, an egg. So you have two-thirds
+of a Latin word, (pistil)--awkwardly and disagreeably edged in between
+pestle and pistol--for the whole thing; you have an English-Latin word
+(ovary) for the bottom of it; an English-Greek word (style) for the middle;
+and a pure Greek word (stigma) for the top.
+
+17. This is a great mess of language, and all the worse that the words
+style and stigma have both of them quite different senses in ordinary and
+scholarly English from this forced botanical one. And I will venture
+therefore, {78} for my own pupils, to put the four names altogether into
+English. Instead of calling the whole thing a pistil, I shall simply call
+it the pillar. Instead of 'ovary,' I shall say 'Treasury' (for a seed isn't
+an egg, but it _is_ a treasure). The style I shall call the 'Shaft,' and
+the stigma the 'Volute.' So you will have your entire pillar divided into
+the treasury, at its base, the shaft, and the volute; and I think you will
+find these divisions easily remembered, and not unfitted to the sense of
+the words in their ordinary use.
+
+18. Round this central, but, in the poppy, very stumpy, pillar, you find a
+cluster of dark threads, with dusty pendants or cups at their ends. For
+these the botanists' name 'stamens,' may be conveniently retained, each
+consisting of a 'filament,' or thread, and an 'anther,' or blossoming part.
+
+And in this rich corolla, and pillar, or pillars, with their treasuries,
+and surrounding crowd of stamens, the essential flower consists. Fewer than
+these several parts, it cannot have, to be a flower at all; of these, the
+corolla leads, and is the object of final purpose. The stamens and the
+treasuries are only there in order to produce future corollas, though often
+themselves decorative in the highest degree.
+
+These, I repeat, are all the essential parts of a flower. But it would have
+been difficult, with any other than the poppy, to have shown you them
+alone; for nearly all other flowers keep with them, all their lives, their
+nurse {79} or tutor leaves,--the group which, in stronger and humbler
+temper, protected them in their first weakness, and formed them to the
+first laws of their being. But the poppy casts these tutorial leaves away.
+It is the finished picture of impatient and luxury-loving youth,--at first
+too severely restrained, then casting all restraint away,--yet retaining to
+the end of life unseemly and illiberal signs of its once compelled
+submission to laws which were only pain,--not instruction.
+
+19. Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its
+side; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there
+complete in size and colour,--its stamens full-grown, but all packed so
+closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of
+shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from
+torture: the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the
+aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can;
+but remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
+
+20. Not so flowers of gracious breeding. Look at these four stages in the
+young life of a primrose, Fig. 7. First confined, as strictly as the poppy
+within five pinching green leaves, whose points close over it, the little
+thing is content to remain a child, and finds its nursery large enough. The
+green leaves unclose their points,--the little yellow ones peep out, like
+ducklings. They find the light delicious, and open wide to it; and grow,
+and grow, {80} and throw themselves wider at last into their perfect rose.
+But they never leave their old nursery for all that; it and they live on
+together; and the nursery seems a part of the flower.
+
+21. Which is so, indeed, in all the loveliest flowers; and, in usual
+botanical parlance, a flower is said to consist of its calyx, (or _hiding_
+part--Calypso having rule over it,) and corolla, or garland part,
+Proserpina having rule over it. But it is better to think of them always as
+separate; for this calyx, very justly so named from its main function of
+concealing the flower, in its youth is usually green, not coloured, and
+shows its separate nature by pausing, or at least greatly lingering, in its
+growth, and modifying itself very slightly, while the corolla is forming
+{81} itself through active change. Look at the two, for instance, through
+the youth of a pease blossom, Fig. 8.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
+
+The entire cluster at first appears pendent in this manner, the stalk
+bending round on purpose to put it into that position. On which all the
+little buds, thinking themselves ill-treated, determine not to submit to
+anything of the sort, turn their points upward persistently, and determine
+that--at any cost of trouble--they will get nearer the sun. Then they begin
+to open, and let out their corollas. I give the process of one only (Fig.
+9).[24] It chances to be engraved the reverse way from the bud; but that is
+of no consequence.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
+
+At first, you see the long lower point of the calyx thought that _it_ was
+going to be the head of the family, and curls upwards eagerly. Then the
+little corolla steals out; and soon does away with that impression on the
+mind of the calyx. The corolla soars up with widening wings, the abashed
+calyx retreats beneath; and finally the great upper leaf of corolla--not
+pleased at having its back still {82} turned to the light, and its face
+down--throws itself entirely back, to look at the sky, and nothing
+else;--and your blossom is complete.
+
+Keeping, therefore, the ideas of calyx and corolla entirely distinct, this
+one general point you may note of both: that, as a calyx is originally
+folded tight over the flower, and has to open deeply to let it out, it is
+nearly always composed of sharp pointed leaves like the segments of a
+balloon; while corollas, having to open out as wide as possible to show
+themselves, are typically like cups or plates, only cut into their edges
+here and there, for ornamentation's sake.
+
+22. And, finally, though the corolla is essentially the floral group of
+leaves, and usually receives the glory of colour for itself only, this
+glory and delight may be given to any other part of the group; and, as if
+to show us that there is no really dishonoured or degraded membership, the
+stalks and leaves in some plants, near the blossom, flush in sympathy with
+it, and become themselves a part of the {83} effectively visible
+flower;--Eryngo--Jura hyacinth, (comosus,) and the edges of upper stems and
+leaves in many plants; while others, (Geranium lucidum,) are made to
+delight us with their leaves rather than their blossoms; only I suppose, in
+these, the scarlet leaf colour is a kind of early autumnal glow,--a
+beautiful hectic, and foretaste, in sacred youth, of sacred death.
+
+I observe, among the speculations of modern science, several, lately, not
+uningenious, and highly industrious, on the subject of the relation of
+colour in flowers, to insects--to selective development, etc., etc. There
+_are_ such relations, of course. So also, the blush of a girl, when she
+first perceives the faltering in her lover's step as he draws near, is
+related essentially to the existing state of her stomach; and to the state
+of it through all the years of her previous existence. Nevertheless,
+neither love, chastity, nor blushing, are merely exponents of digestion.
+
+All these materialisms, in their unclean stupidity, are essentially the
+work of human bats; men of semi-faculty or semi-education, who are more or
+less incapable of so much as seeing, much less thinking about, colour;
+among whom, for one-sided intensity, even Mr. Darwin must be often ranked,
+as in his vespertilian treatise on the ocelli of the Argus pheasant, which
+he imagines to be artistically gradated, and perfectly imitative of a ball
+and socket. If I had him here in Oxford for a week, and could force him to
+try to copy a feather by Bewick, or to draw for himself a boy's thumbed
+marble, his notions of feathers, and balls, {84} would be changed for all
+the rest of his life. But his ignorance of good art is no excuse for the
+acutely illogical simplicity of the rest of his talk of colour in the
+"Descent of Man." Peacocks' tails, he thinks, are the result of the
+admiration of blue tails in the minds of well-bred peahens,--and similarly,
+mandrills' noses the result of the admiration of blue noses in well-bred
+baboons. But it never occurs to him to ask why the admiration of blue noses
+is healthy in baboons, so that it develops their race properly, while
+similar maidenly admiration either of blue noses or red noses in men would
+be improper, and develop the race improperly. The word itself 'proper'
+being one of which he has never asked, or guessed, the meaning. And when he
+imagined the gradation of the cloudings in feathers to represent successive
+generation, it never occurred to him to look at the much finer cloudy
+gradations in the clouds of dawn themselves; and explain the modes of
+sexual preference and selective development which had brought _them_ to
+their scarlet glory, before the cock could crow thrice. Putting all these
+vespertilian speculations out of our way, the human facts concerning colour
+are briefly these. Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and
+wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them--in sky, sea,
+flowers, and living creatures.
+
+On the other hand, wherever men are ignoble and sensual, they endure
+without pain, and at last even come to like (especially if artists,)
+mud-colour and black, and to dislike rose-colour and white. And wherever it
+is unhealthy for {85} them to live, the poisonousness of the place is
+marked by some ghastly colour in air, earth, or flowers.
+
+There are, of course, exceptions to all such widely founded laws; there are
+poisonous berries of scarlet, and pestilent skies that are fair. But, if we
+once honestly compare a venomous wood-fungus, rotting into black
+dissolution of dripped slime at its edges, with a spring gentian; or a puff
+adder with a salmon trout, or a fog in Bermondsey with a clear sky at
+Berne, we shall get hold of the entire question on its right side; and be
+able afterwards to study at our leisure, or accept without doubt or
+trouble, facts of apparently contrary meaning. And the practical lesson
+which I wish to leave with the reader is, that lovely flowers, and green
+trees growing in the open air, are the proper guides of men to the places
+which their Maker intended them to inhabit; while the flowerless and
+treeless deserts--of reed, or sand, or rock,--are meant to be either
+heroically invaded and redeemed, or surrendered to the wild creatures which
+are appointed for them; happy and wonderful in their wild abodes.
+
+Nor is the world so small but that we may yet leave in it also unconquered
+spaces of beautiful solitude; where the chamois and red deer may wander
+fearless,--nor any fire of avarice scorch from the Highlands of Alp, or
+Grampian, the rapture of the heath, and the rose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{86}
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+PAPAVER RHOEAS.
+
+BRANTWOOD, _July 11th, 1875_.
+
+1. Chancing to take up yesterday a favourite old book, Mavor's British
+Tourists, (London, 1798,) I found in its fourth volume a delightful diary
+of a journey made in 1782 through various parts of England, by Charles P.
+Moritz of Berlin.
+
+And in the fourteenth page of this diary I find the following passage,
+pleasantly complimentary to England:--
+
+"The slices of bread and butter which they give you with your tea are as
+thin as poppy leaves. But there is another kind of bread and butter usually
+eaten with tea, which is toasted by the fire, and is incomparably good.
+This is called 'toast.'"
+
+I wonder how many people, nowadays, whose bread and butter was cut too thin
+for them, would think of comparing the slices to poppy leaves? But this was
+in the old days of travelling, when people did not whirl themselves past
+corn-fields, that they might have more time to walk on paving-stones; and
+understood that {87} poppies did not mingle their scarlet among the gold,
+without some purpose of the poppy-Maker that they should be looked at.
+
+Nevertheless, with respect to the good and polite German's
+poetically-contemplated, and finely aesthetic, tea, may it not be asked
+whether poppy leaves themselves, like the bread and butter, are not, if we
+may venture an opinion--_too_ thin,--im-_properly_ thin? In the last
+chapter, my reader was, I hope, a little anxious to know what I meant by
+saying that modern philosophers did not know the meaning of the word
+'proper,' and may wish to know what I mean by it myself. And this I think
+it needful to explain before going farther.
+
+2. In our English prayer-book translation, the first verse of the
+ninety-third Psalm runs thus: "The Lord is King; and hath put on glorious
+apparel." And although, in the future republican world, there are to be no
+lords, no kings, and no glorious apparel, it will be found convenient, for
+botanical purposes, to remember what such things once were; for when I said
+of the poppy, in last chapter, that it was "robed in the purple of the
+Caesars," the words gave, to any one who had a clear idea of a Caesar, and of
+his dress, a better, and even _stricter_, account of the flower than if I
+had only said, with Mr. Sowerby, "petals bright scarlet;" which might just
+as well have been said of a pimpernel, or scarlet geranium;--but of neither
+of these latter should I have said "robed in purple of Caesars." What I
+meant was, first, that the poppy leaf {88} looks dyed through and through,
+like glass, or Tyrian tissue; and not merely painted: secondly, that the
+splendour of it is proud,--almost insolently so. Augustus, in his glory,
+might have been clothed like one of these; and Saul; but not David, nor
+Solomon; still less the teacher of Solomon, when He puts on 'glorious
+apparel.'
+
+3. Let us look, however, at the two translations of the same verse.
+
+In the vulgate it is "Dominus regnavit; decorem indutus est;" He has put on
+'becomingness,'--decent apparel, rather than glorious.
+
+In the Septuagint it is [Greek: euprepeia]--_well_-becomingness; an
+expression which, if the reader considers, must imply certainly the
+existence of an opposite idea of possible '_ill_-becomingness,'--of an
+apparel which should, in just as accurate a sense, belong appropriately to
+the creature invested with it, and yet not be glorious, but inglorious, and
+not well-becoming, but ill-becoming. The mandrill's blue nose, for
+instance, already referred to,--can we rightly speak of this as '[Greek:
+euprepeia]'? Or the stings, and minute, colourless blossoming of the
+nettle? May we call these a glorious apparel, as we may the glowing of an
+alpine rose?
+
+You will find on reflection, and find more convincingly the more accurately
+you reflect, that there is an absolute sense attached to such words as
+'decent,' 'honourable,' 'glorious,' or '[Greek: kalos],' contrary to
+another absolute sense in the words 'indecent,' 'shameful,' 'vile,' or
+'[Greek: aischros].' {89}
+
+And that there is every degree of these absolute qualities visible in
+living creatures; and that the divinity of the Mind of man is in its
+essential discernment of what is [Greek: kalon] from what is [Greek:
+aischron], and in his preference of the kind of creatures which are decent,
+to those which are indecent; and of the kinds of thoughts, in himself,
+which are noble, to those which are vile.
+
+4. When therefore I said that Mr. Darwin, and his school,[25] had no
+conception of the real meaning of the word 'proper,' I meant that they
+conceived the qualities of things only as their 'properties,' but not as
+their becomingnesses;' and seeing that dirt is proper to a swine, malice to
+a monkey, poison to a nettle, and folly to a fool, they called a nettle
+_but_ a nettle, and the faults of fools but folly; and never saw the
+difference between ugliness and beauty absolute, decency and indecency
+absolute, glory or shame absolute, and folly or sense absolute.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 10.]
+
+Whereas, the perception of beauty, and the power of defining physical
+character, are based on moral instinct, and on the power of defining animal
+or human character. Nor is it possible to say that one flower is more
+highly developed, or one animal of a higher order, than another, without
+the assumption of a divine law of perfection to which the one more conforms
+than the other.
+
+5. Thus, for instance. That it should ever have been an open question with
+me whether a poppy had always {90} two of its petals less than the other
+two, depended wholly on the hurry and imperfection with which the poppy
+carries out its plan. It never would have occurred to me to {91} doubt
+whether an iris had three of its leaves smaller than the other three,
+because an iris always completes itself to its own ideal. Nevertheless, on
+examining various poppies, as I have walked, this summer, up and down the
+hills between Sheffield and Wakefield, I find the subordination of the
+upper and lower petals entirely necessary and normal; and that the result
+of it is to give two distinct profiles to the poppy cup, the difference
+between which, however, we shall see better in the yellow Welsh poppy, at
+present called Meconopsis Cambrica; but which, in the Oxford schools, will
+be 'Papaver cruciforme'--'Crosslet Poppy,'--first, because all our
+botanical names must be in Latin if possible; Greek only allowed when we
+can do no better; secondly, because meconopsis is barbarous Greek; thirdly,
+and chiefly, because it is little matter whether this poppy be Welsh or
+English; but very needful that we should observe, wherever it grows, that
+the petals are arranged in what used to be, in my young days, called a
+diamond shape,[26] as at A, Fig. 10, the two narrow inner ones at right
+angles to, and projecting farther than, the two outside broad ones; and
+that the two broad ones, when the flower is seen in profile, as at B, show
+their margins folded back, as indicated by the thicker lines, and have a
+profile curve, which is only the softening, or melting away into each
+other, of two straight lines. Indeed, when the flower is younger, and quite
+strong, both its {92} profiles, A and B, Fig. 11, are nearly
+straight-sided; and always, be it young or old, one broader than the other,
+so as to give the flower, seen from above, the shape of a contracted cross,
+or crosslet.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 11.]
+
+6. Now I find no notice of this flower in Gerarde; and in Sowerby, out of
+eighteen lines of closely printed descriptive text, no notice of its
+crosslet form, while the petals are only stated to be "roundish-concave,"
+terms equally applicable to at least one-half of all flower petals in the
+{93} world. The leaves are _said_ to be very deeply pinnately partite; but
+_drawn_--as neither pinnate nor partite!
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
+
+And this is your modern cheap science, in ten volumes. Now I haven't a
+quiet moment to spare for drawing this morning; but I merely give the main
+relations of the petals, A, and blot in the wrinkles of one of the lower
+ones, B, Fig. 12; and yet in this rude sketch you will feel, I believe,
+there is something specific which could not belong to any other flower. But
+all proper description is {94} impossible without careful profiles of each
+petal laterally and across it. Which I may not find time to draw for any
+poppy whatever, because they none of them have well-becomingness enough to
+make it worth my while, being all more or less weedy, and ungracious, and
+mingled of good and evil. Whereupon rises before me, ghostly and untenable,
+the general question, 'What is a weed?' and, impatient for answer, the
+particular question, What is a poppy? I choose, for instance, to call this
+yellow flower a poppy, instead of a "likeness to poppy," which the
+botanists meant to call it, in their bad Greek. I choose also to call a
+poppy, what the botanists have called "glaucous thing," (glaucium). But
+where and when shall I stop calling things poppies? This is certainly a
+question to be settled at once, with others appertaining to it.
+
+7. In the first place, then, I mean to call every flower either one thing
+or another, and not an 'aceous' thing, only half something or half another.
+I mean to call this plant now in my hand, either a poppy or not a poppy;
+but not poppaceous. And this other, either a thistle or not a thistle; but
+not thistlaceous. And this other, either a nettle or not a nettle; but not
+nettlaceous. I know it will be very difficult to carry out this principle
+when tribes of plants are much extended and varied in type: I shall persist
+in it, however, as far as possible; and when plants change so much that one
+cannot with any conscience call them by their family name any more, I shall
+put them aside somewhere among families of poor relations, not {95} to be
+minded for the present, until we are well acquainted with the better bred
+circles; I don't know, for instance, whether I shall call the Burnet
+'Grass-rose,' or put it out of court for having no petals; but it certainly
+shall not be called rosaceous; and my first point will be to make sure of
+my pupils having a clear idea of the central and unquestionable forms of
+thistle, grass, or rose, and assigning to them pure Latin, and pretty
+English, names,--classical, if possible; and at least intelligible and
+decorous.
+
+8. I return to our present special question, then, What is a poppy? and
+return also to a book I gave away long ago, and have just begged back
+again, Dr. Lindley's 'Ladies' Botany.' For without at all looking upon
+ladies as inferior beings, I dimly hope that what Dr. Lindley considers
+likely to be intelligible to _them_, may be also clear to their very humble
+servant.
+
+The poppies, I find, (page 19, vol. i.) differ from crowfeet in being of a
+stupifying instead of a burning nature, and in generally having two sepals
+and twice two petals; "but as some poppies have three sepals, and twice
+three petals, the number of these parts is not sufficiently constant to
+form an essential mark." Yes, I know that, for I found a superb six-petaled
+poppy, spotted like a cistus, the other day in a friend's garden. But then,
+what makes it a poppy still? That it is of a stupifying nature, and itself
+so stupid that it does not know how many petals it should have, is surely
+not enough distinction?
+
+9. Returning to Lindley, and working the matter {96} farther out with his
+help, I think this definition might stand. "A poppy is a flower which has
+either four or six petals, and two or more treasuries, united into one;
+containing a milky, stupifying fluid in its stalks and leaves, and always
+throwing away its calyx when it blossoms."
+
+And indeed, every flower which unites all these characters, we shall, in
+the Oxford schools, call 'poppy,' and 'Papaver;' but when I get fairly into
+work, I hope to fix my definitions into more strict terms. For I wish all
+my pupils to form the habit of asking, of every plant, these following four
+questions, in order, corresponding to the subject of these opening
+chapters, namely, "What root has it? what leaf? what flower? and what
+stem?" And, in this definition of poppies, nothing whatever is said about
+the root; and not only I don't know myself what a poppy root is like, but
+in all Sowerby's poppy section, I find no word whatever about that matter.
+
+10. Leaving, however, for the present, the root unthought of, and
+contenting myself with Dr. Lindley's characteristics, I shall place, at the
+head of the whole group, our common European wild poppy, Papaver Rhoeas,
+and, with this, arrange the nine following other flowers thus,--opposite.
+
+I must be content at present with determining the Latin names for the
+Oxford schools; the English ones I shall give as they chance to occur to
+me, in Gerarde and the classical poets who wrote before the English
+revolution. When no satisfactory name is to be found, I must try to invent
+one; as, for instance, just now, I don't like Gerarde's 'Corn-rose' for
+Papaver Rhoeas, and must coin another; but this can't be done by thinking;
+it will come into my head some day, by chance. I might try at it
+straightforwardly for a week together, and not do it.
+
+{97}
+
+  NAME IN OXFORD CATALOGUE.  DIOSCORIDES.         In present Botany.
+   1. Papaver Rhoeas     [Greek: mekon rhoias]       Papaver Rhoeas
+   2. P. Hortense        [Greek: m. kepeute][27]     P. Hortense
+   3. P. Elatum          [Greek: m. thulakitis][28]  P. Lamottei
+   4. P. Argemone                                    P. Argemone
+   5. P. Echinosum                                   P. Hybridum
+   6. P. Violaceum                                   Roemeria Hybrida
+   7. P. Cruciforme                                  Meconopsis Cambrica
+   8. P. Corniculatum    [Greek: m. keratitis]       Glaucium Corniculatum
+   9. P. Littorale       [Greek: m. paralios]        Glaucium Luteum
+  10. P. Chelidonium                                 Chelidonium Majus
+
+{98} The Latin names must be fixed at once, somehow; and therefore I do the
+best I can, keeping as much respect for the old nomenclature as possible,
+though this involves the illogical practice of giving the epithet sometimes
+from the flower, (violaceum, cruciforme), and sometimes from the seed
+vessel, (elatum, echinosum, corniculatum). Guarding this distinction,
+however, we may perhaps be content to call the six last of the group, in
+English, Urchin Poppy, Violet Poppy, Crosslet Poppy, Horned Poppy, Beach
+Poppy, and Welcome Poppy. I don't think the last flower pretty enough to be
+connected more directly with the swallow, in its English name.
+
+11. I shall be well content if my pupils know these ten poppies rightly;
+all of them at present wild in our own country, and, I believe, also
+European in range: the head and type of all being the common wild poppy of
+our cornfields for which the name 'Papaver Rhoeas,' given it by
+Dioscorides, Gerarde, and Linnaeus, is entirely authoritative, and we will
+therefore at once examine the meaning, and reason, of that name.
+
+12. Dioscorides says the name belongs to it "[Greek: dia to tacheos to
+anthos apoballein]," "because it casts off its bloom {99} quickly," from
+[Greek: rheo,] (rheo) in the sense of shedding.[29] And this indeed it
+does,--first calyx, then corolla;--you may translate it 'swiftly ruinous'
+poppy, but notice, in connection with this idea, how it droops its head
+_before_ blooming; an action which, I doubt not, mingled in Homer's thought
+with the image of its depression when filled by rain, in the passage of the
+Iliad, which, as I have relieved your memory of three unnecessary names of
+poppy families, you have memory to spare for learning.
+
+ "[Greek: mekon d' hos heterose kare balen, het' eni kepoi]
+  [Greek: karpoi brithomene, notieisi te eiarineisin]
+  [Greek: hos heteros' emuse kare peleki barunthen.]"
+
+"And as a poppy lets its head fall aside, which in a garden is loaded with
+its fruit, and with the soft rains of spring, so the youth drooped his head
+on one side; burdened with the helmet."
+
+And now you shall compare the translations of this passage, with its
+context, by Chapman and Pope--(or the school of Pope), the one being by a
+man of pure English temper, and able therefore to understand pure Greek
+temper; the other infected with all the faults of the falsely classical
+school of the Renaissance.
+
+First I take Chapman:--
+
+ "His shaft smit fair Gorgythion of Priam's princely race
+  Who in AEpina was brought forth, a famous town in Thrace,
+  {100}
+  By Castianeira, that for form was like celestial breed.
+  And as a crimson poppy-flower, surcharged with his seed,
+  And vernal humours falling thick, declines his heavy brow,
+  So, a-oneside, his helmet's weight his fainting head did bow."
+
+Next, Pope:--
+
+ "He missed the mark; but pierced Gorgythio's heart,
+  And drenched in royal blood the thirsty dart:
+  (Fair Castianeira, nymph of form divine,
+  This offspring added to King Priam's line).
+  As full-blown poppies, overcharged with rain,
+  Decline the head, and drooping kiss the plain,
+  So sinks the youth: his beauteous head, depressed
+  Beneath his helmet, drops upon his breast."
+
+13. I give you the two passages in full, trusting that you may so feel the
+becomingness of the one, and the gracelessness of the other. But note
+farther, in the Homeric passage, one subtlety which cannot enough be marked
+even in Chapman's English, that his second word, [Greek: emuse], is
+employed by him both of the stooping of ears of corn, under wind, and of
+Troy stooping to its ruin;[30] and otherwise, in good Greek writers, the
+word is marked as having such specific sense of men's drooping under
+weight; or towards death, under the burden of fortune which they have no
+more strength to sustain;[31] compare the passage {101} I quoted from
+Plato, ('Crown of Wild Olive,' p. 95): "And bore lightly the burden of gold
+and of possessions." {102} And thus you will begin to understand how the
+poppy became in the heathen mind the type at once of power, or pride, and
+of its loss; and therefore, both why Virgil represents the white nymph
+Nais, "pallentes violas, et summa papavera carpens,"--gathering the pale
+flags, and the highest poppies,--and the reason for the choice of this
+rather than any other flower, in the story of Tarquin's message to his son.
+
+14. But you are next to remember the word Rhoeas in another sense. Whether
+originally intended or afterwards caught at, the resemblance of the word to
+'Rhoea,' a pomegranate, mentally connects itself with the resemblance of
+the poppy head to the pomegranate fruit.
+
+And if I allow this flower to be the first we take up for careful study in
+Proserpina, on account of its simplicity of form and splendour of colour, I
+wish you also to remember, in connection with it, the cause of Proserpine's
+eternal captivity--her having tasted a pomegranate seed,--the pomegranate
+being in Greek mythology what the apple is in the Mosaic legend; and, in
+the whole {103} worship of Demeter, associated with the poppy by a
+multitude of ideas which are not definitely expressed, but can only be
+gathered out of Greek art and literature, as we learn their symbolism. The
+chief character on which these thoughts are founded is the fulness of seed
+in the poppy and pomegranate, as an image of life: then the forms of both
+became adopted for beads or bosses in ornamental art; the pomegranate
+remains more distinctly a Jewish and Christian type, from its use in the
+border of Aaron's robe, down to the fruit in the hand of Angelico's and
+Botticelli's Infant Christs; while the poppy is gradually confused by the
+Byzantine Greeks with grapes; and both of these with palm fruit. The palm,
+in the shorthand of their art, gradually becomes a symmetrical branched
+ornament with two pendent bosses; this is again confused with the Greek
+iris, (Homer's blue iris, and Pindar's water-flag,)--and the Florentines,
+in adopting Byzantine ornament, read it into their own Fleur-de-lys; but
+insert two poppyheads on each side of the entire foil, in their finest
+heraldry.
+
+15. Meantime the definitely intended poppy, in late Christian Greek art of
+the twelfth century, modifies the form of the Acanthus leaf with its own,
+until the northern twelfth century workman takes the thistle-head for the
+poppy, and the thistle-leaf for acanthus. The true poppy-head remains in
+the south, but gets more and more confused with grapes, till the
+Renaissance carvers are content with any kind of boss full of seed, but
+insist on such boss {104} or bursting globe as some essential part of their
+ornament;--the bean-pod for the same reason (not without Pythagorean
+notions, and some of republican election) is used by Brunelleschi for main
+decoration of the lantern of Florence duomo; and, finally, the
+ornamentation gets so shapeless, that M. Violet-le-Duc, in his 'Dictionary
+of Ornament,' loses trace of its origin altogether, and fancies the later
+forms were derived from the spadix of the arum.
+
+16. I have no time to enter into farther details; but through all this vast
+range of art, note this singular fact, that the wheat-ear, the vine, the
+fleur-de-lys, the poppy, and the jagged leaf of the acanthus-weed, or
+thistle, occupy the entire thoughts of the decorative workmen trained in
+classic schools, to the exclusion of the rose, true lily, and the other
+flowers of luxury. And that the deeply underlying reason of this is in the
+relation of weeds to corn, or of the adverse powers of nature to the
+beneficent ones, expressed for us readers of the Jewish scriptures,
+centrally in the verse, "thorns also, and thistles, shall it bring forth to
+thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field" ([Greek: chortos], grass or
+corn), and exquisitely symbolized throughout the fields of Europe by the
+presence of the purple 'corn-flag,' or gladiolus, and 'corn-rose'
+(Gerarde's name for Papaver Rhoeas), in the midst of carelessly tended
+corn; and in the traditions of the art of Europe by the springing of the
+acanthus round the basket of the canephora, strictly the basket _for
+bread_, the idea of bread {105} including all sacred things carried at the
+feasts of Demeter, Bacchus, and the Queen of the Air. And this springing of
+the thorny weeds round the basket of reed, distinctly taken up by the
+Byzantine Italians in the basketwork capital of the twelfth century, (which
+I have already illustrated at length in the 'Stones of Venice,') becomes
+the germ of all capitals whatsoever, in the great schools of Gothic, to the
+end of Gothic time, and also of all the capitals of the pure and noble
+Renaissance architecture of Angelico and Perugino, and all that was learned
+from them in the north, while the introduction of the rose, as a primal
+element of decoration, only takes place when the luxury of English
+decorated Gothic, the result of that licentious spirit in the lords which
+brought on the Wars of the Roses, indicates the approach of destruction to
+the feudal, artistic, and moral power of the northern nations.
+
+For which reason, and many others, I must yet delay the following out of
+our main subject, till I have answered the other question, which brought me
+to pause in the middle of this chapter, namely, 'What is a weed?'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{106}
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE PARABLE OF JOASH.
+
+1. Some ten or twelve years ago, I bought--three times twelve are
+thirty-six--of a delightful little book by Mrs. Gatty, called 'Aunt Judy's
+Tales'--whereof to make presents to my little lady friends. I had, at that
+happy time, perhaps from four-and-twenty to six-and-thirty--I forget
+exactly how many--very particular little lady friends; and greatly wished
+Aunt Judy to be the thirty-seventh,--the kindest, wittiest, prettiest girl
+one had ever read of, at least in so entirely proper and orthodox
+literature.
+
+2. Not but that it is a suspicious sign of infirmity of faith in our modern
+moralists to make their exemplary young people always pretty; and dress
+them always in the height of the fashion. One may read Miss Edgeworth's
+'Harry and Lucy,' 'Frank and Mary,' 'Fashionable Tales,' or 'Parents'
+Assistant,' through, from end to end, with extremest care; and never find
+out whether Lucy was tall or short, nor whether Mary was dark or fair, nor
+how Miss Annaly was dressed, nor--which was my own chief point of
+interest--what was the colour of {107} Rosamond's eyes. Whereas Aunt Judy,
+in charming position after position, is shown to have expressed all her
+pure evangelical principles with the prettiest of lips; and to have had her
+gown, though puritanically plain, made by one of the best modistes in
+London.
+
+3. Nevertheless, the book is wholesome and useful; and the nicest story in
+it, as far as I recollect, is an inquiry into the subject which is our
+present business, 'What is a weed?'--in which, by many pleasant devices,
+Aunt Judy leads her little brothers and sisters to discern that a weed is
+'a plant in the wrong place.'
+
+'Vegetable' in the wrong place, by the way, I think Aunt Judy says, being a
+precisely scientific little aunt. But I can't keep it out of my own less
+scientific head that 'vegetable' means only something going to be boiled. I
+like 'plant' better for general sense, besides that it's shorter.
+
+Whatever we call them, Aunt Judy is perfectly right about them as far as
+she has gone; but, as happens often even to the best of evangelical
+instructresses, she has stopped just short of the gist of the whole matter.
+It is entirely true that a weed is a plant that has got into a wrong place;
+but it never seems to have occurred to Aunt Judy that some plants never
+_do_!
+
+Who ever saw a wood anemone or a heath blossom in the wrong place? Who ever
+saw nettle or hemlock in a right one? And yet, the difference between
+flower and weed, (I use, for convenience sake, these words in their {108}
+familiar opposition,) certainly does not consist merely in the flowers
+being innocent, and the weed stinging and venomous. We do not call the
+nightshade a weed in our hedges, nor the scarlet agaric in our woods. But
+we do the corncockle in our fields.
+
+4. Had the thoughtful little tutoress gone but one thought farther, and
+instead of "a vegetable in a wrong place," (which it may happen to the
+innocentest vegetable sometimes to be, without turning into a weed,
+therefore,) said, "A vegetable which has an innate disposition to _get_
+into the wrong place," she would have greatly furthered the matter for us;
+but then she perhaps would have felt herself to be uncharitably dividing
+with vegetables her own little evangelical property of original sin.
+
+5. This, you will find, nevertheless, to be the very essence of weed
+character--in plants, as in men. If you glance through your botanical
+books, you will see often added certain names--'a troublesome weed.' It is
+not its being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent--thrusting
+itself where it has no business, and hinders other people's business--that
+makes a weed of it. The most accursed of all vegetables, the one that has
+destroyed for the present even the possibility of European civilization, is
+only called a weed in the slang of its votaries;[32] but in the finest and
+truest English we call so the plant which {109} has come to us by chance
+from the same country, the type of mere senseless prolific activity, the
+American water-plant, choking our streams till the very fish that leap out
+of them cannot fall back, but die on the clogged surface; and indeed, for
+this unrestrainable, unconquerable insolence of uselessness, what name can
+be enough dishonourable?
+
+6. I pass to vegetation of nobler rank.
+
+You remember, I was obliged in the last chapter to leave my poppy, for the
+present, without an English specific name, because I don't like Gerarde's
+'Corn-rose,' and can't yet think of another. Nevertheless, I would have
+used Gerarde's name, if the corn-rose were as much a rose as the corn-flag
+is a flag. But it isn't. The rose and lily have quite different relations
+to the corn. The lily is grass in loveliness, as the corn is grass in use;
+and both grow together in peace--gladiolus in the wheat, and narcissus in
+the pasture. But the rose is of another and higher order than the corn, and
+you never saw a cornfield overrun with sweetbriar or apple-blossom.
+
+They have no mind, they, to get into the wrong place.
+
+What is it, then, this temper in some plants--malicious as it
+seems--intrusive, at all events, or erring,--which brings them out of their
+places--thrusts them where they thwart us and offend?
+
+7. Primarily, it is mere hardihood and coarseness of make. A plant that can
+live anywhere, will often live where it is not wanted. But the delicate and
+tender ones {110} keep at home. You have no trouble in 'keeping down' the
+spring gentian. It rejoices in its own Alpine home, and makes the earth as
+like heaven as it can, but yields as softly as the air, if you want it to
+give place. Here in England, it will only grow on the loneliest moors,
+above the high force of Tees; its Latin name, for _us_ (I may as well tell
+you at once) is to be 'Lucia verna;' and its English one, Lucy of Teesdale.
+
+8. But a plant may be hardy, and coarse of make, and able to live anywhere,
+and yet be no weed. The coltsfoot, so far as I know, is the first of
+large-leaved plants to grow afresh on ground that has been disturbed: fall
+of Alpine debris, ruin of railroad embankment, waste of drifted slime by
+flood, it seeks to heal and redeem; but it does not offend us in our
+gardens, nor impoverish us in our fields.
+
+Nevertheless, mere coarseness of structure, indiscriminate hardihood, is at
+least a point of some unworthiness in a plant. That it should have no
+choice of home, no love of native land, is ungentle; much more if such
+discrimination as it has, be immodest, and incline it, seemingly, to open
+and much-traversed places, where it may be continually seen of strangers.
+The tormentilla gleams in showers along the mountain turf; her delicate
+crosslets are separate, though constellate, as the rubied daisy. But the
+king-cup--(blessing be upon it always no less)--crowds itself sometimes
+into too burnished flame of inevitable gold. I don't know if there was
+anything in the {111} darkness of this last spring to make it brighter in
+resistance; but I never saw any spaces of full warm yellow, in natural
+colour, so intense as the meadows between Reading and the Thames; nor did I
+know perfectly what purple and gold meant, till I saw a field of park land
+embroidered a foot deep with king-cup and clover--while I was correcting my
+last notes on the spring colours of the Royal Academy--at Aylesbury.
+
+9. And there are two other questions of extreme subtlety connected with
+this main one. What shall we say of the plants whose entire destiny is
+parasitic--which are not only sometimes, and _im_pertinently, but always,
+and pertinently, out of place; not only out of the right place, but out of
+any place of their own? When is mistletoe, for instance, in the right
+place, young ladies, think you? On an apple tree, or on a ceiling? When is
+ivy in the right place?--when wallflower? The ivy has been torn down from
+the towers of Kenilworth; the weeds from the arches of the Coliseum, and
+from the steps of the Araceli, irreverently, vilely, and in vain; but how
+are we to separate the creatures whose office it is to abate the grief of
+ruin by their gentleness,
+
+         "wafting wallflower scents
+  From out the crumbling ruins of fallen pride,
+  And chambers of transgression, now forlorn,"
+
+from those which truly resist the toil of men, and conspire against their
+fame; which are cunning to consume, and {112} prolific to encumber; and of
+whose perverse and unwelcome sowing we know, and can say assuredly, "An
+enemy hath done this."
+
+10. Again. The character of strength which gives prevalence over others to
+any common plant, is more or less consistently dependent on woody fibre in
+the leaves; giving them strong ribs and great expanding extent; or spinous
+edges, and wrinkled or gathered extent.
+
+Get clearly into your mind the nature of those two conditions. When a leaf
+is to be spread wide, like the Burdock, it is supported by a framework of
+extending ribs like a Gothic roof. The supporting function of these is
+geometrical; every one is constructed like the girders of a bridge, or
+beams of a floor, with all manner of science in the distribution of their
+substance in the section, for narrow and deep strength; and the shafts are
+mostly hollow. But when the extending space of a leaf is to be enriched
+with fulness of folds, and become beautiful in wrinkles, this may be done
+either by pure undulation as of a liquid current along the leaf edge, or by
+sharp 'drawing'--or 'gathering' I believe ladies would call it--and
+stitching of the edges together. And this stitching together, if to be done
+very strongly, is done round a bit of stick, as a sail is reefed round a
+mast; and this bit of stick needs to be compactly, not geometrically
+strong; its function is essentially that of starch,--not to hold the leaf
+up off the ground against gravity; but to stick the edges out, stiffly, in
+a crimped frill. And in beautiful work of {113} this kind, which we are
+meant to study, the stays of the leaf--or stay-bones--are finished off very
+sharply and exquisitely at the points; and indeed so much so, that they
+prick our fingers when we touch them; for they are not at all meant to be
+touched, but admired.
+
+11. To be admired,--with qualification, indeed, always, but with extreme
+respect for their endurance and orderliness. Among flowers that pass away,
+and leaves that shake as with ague, or shrink like bad cloth,--these, in
+their sturdy growth and enduring life, we are bound to honour; and, under
+the green holly, remember how much softer friendship was failing, and how
+much of other loving, folly. And yet--you are not to confuse the thistle
+with the cedar that is in Lebanon; nor to forget--if the spinous nature of
+it become too cruel to provoke and offend--the parable of Joash to Amaziah,
+and its fulfilment: "There passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and
+trode down the thistle."
+
+12. Then, lastly, if this rudeness and insensitiveness of nature be gifted
+with no redeeming beauty; if the boss of the thistle lose its purple, and
+the star of the Lion's tooth, its light; and, much more, if service be
+perverted as beauty is lost, and the honied tube, and medicinal leaf,
+change into mere swollen emptiness, and salt brown membrane, swayed in
+nerveless languor by the idle sea,--at last the separation between the two
+natures is as great as between the fruitful earth and fruitless ocean; and
+between the living hands that tend the Garden of Herbs where {114} Love is,
+and those unclasped, that toss with tangle and with shells.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+13. I had a long bit in my head, that I wanted to write, about St. George
+of the Seaweed, but I've no time to do it; and those few words of
+Tennyson's are enough, if one thinks of them: only I see, in correcting
+press, that I've partly misapplied the idea of 'gathering' in the leaf
+edge. It would be more accurate to say it was gathered at the central rib;
+but there is nothing in needlework that will represent the actual excess by
+lateral growth at the edge, giving three or four inches of edge for one of
+centre. But the stiffening of the fold by the thorn which holds it out is
+very like the action of a ship's spars on its sails; and absolutely in many
+cases like that of the spines in a fish's fin, passing into the various
+conditions of serpentine and dracontic crest, connected with all the
+terrors and adversities of nature; not to be dealt with in a chapter on
+weeds.
+
+14. Here is a sketch of a crested leaf of less adverse temper, which may as
+well be given, together with Plate III., in this number, these two
+engravings being meant for examples of two different methods of drawing,
+both useful according to character of subject. Plate III. is sketched first
+with a finely-pointed pen, and common ink, on white paper; then washed
+rapidly with colour, and retouched with the pen to give sharpness and
+completion. {115} This method is used because the thistle leaves are full
+of complex and sharp sinuosities, and set with intensely sharp spines
+passing into hairs, which require many kinds of execution with the fine
+point to imitate at all. In the drawing there was more look of the bloom or
+woolliness on the stems, but it was useless to try for this in the
+mezzotint, and I desired Mr. Allen to leave his work at the stage where it
+expressed as much form as I wanted. The leaves are of the common marsh
+thistle, of which more anon; and the two long lateral ones are only two
+different views of the same leaf, while the central figure is a young leaf
+just opening. It beat me, in its delicate bossing, and I had to leave it,
+discontentedly enough.
+
+Plate IV. is much better work, being of an easier subject, adequately
+enough rendered by perfectly simple means. Here I had only a succulent and
+membranous surface to represent, with definite outlines, and merely
+undulating folds; and this is sufficiently done by a careful and firm pen
+outline on grey paper, with a slight wash of colour afterwards, reinforced
+in the darks; then marking the lights with white. This method is classic
+and authoritative, being used by many of the greatest masters, (by Holbein
+continually;) and it is much the best which the general student can adopt
+for expression of the action and muscular power of plants.
+
+The goodness or badness of such work depends absolutely on the truth of the
+single line. You will find a thousand botanical drawings which will give
+you a {116} delicate and deceptive resemblance of the leaf, for one that
+will give you the right convexity in its backbone, the right perspective of
+its peaks when they foreshorten, or the right relation of depth in the
+shading of its dimples. On which, in leaves as in faces, no little
+expression of temper depends.
+
+Meantime we have yet to consider somewhat more touching that temper itself,
+in next chapter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{117}
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM.
+
+1. I do not know if my readers were checked, as I wished them to be, at
+least for a moment, in the close of the last chapter, by my talking of
+thistles and dandelions changing into seaweed, by gradation of which,
+doubtless, Mr. Darwin can furnish us with specious and sufficient
+instances. But the two groups will not be contemplated in our Oxford system
+as in any parental relations whatsoever.
+
+We shall, however, find some very notable relations existing between the
+two groups of the wild flowers of dry land, which represent, in the widest
+extent, and the distinctest opposition, the two characters of material
+serviceableness and unserviceableness; the groups which in our English
+classification will be easily remembered as those of the Thyme, and the
+Daisy.
+
+The one, scented as with incense--medicinal--and in all gentle and humble
+ways, useful. The other, scentless--helpless for ministry to the body;
+infinitely dear as the bringer of light, ruby, white and gold; the three
+colours of the Day, with no hue of shade in it. Therefore I {118} take it
+on the coins of St. George for the symbol of the splendour or light of
+heaven, which is dearest where humblest.
+
+2. Now these great two orders--of which the types are the thyme and the
+daisy--you are to remember generally as the 'Herbs' and the 'Sunflowers.'
+You are not to call them Lipped flowers, nor Composed flowers; because the
+first is a vulgar term; for when you once come to be able to draw a lip,
+or, in noble duty, to kiss one, you will know that no other flower in earth
+is like that: and the second is an indefinite term; for a foxglove is as
+much a 'composed' flower as a daisy; but it is composed in the shape of a
+spire, instead of the shape of the sun. And again a thistle, which common
+botany calls a composed flower, as well as a daisy, is composed in quite
+another shape, being on the whole, bossy instead of flat; and of another
+temper, or composition of mind, also, being connected in that respect with
+butterburs, and a vast company of rough, knotty, half-black or brown, and
+generally unluminous--flowers I can scarcely call them--and weeds I will
+not,--creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general
+name 'Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she
+returns to the day from the dead.
+
+But the wilder and stronger blossoms of the Hawk's-eye--again you see I
+refuse for them the word weed;--and the waste-loving Chicory, which the
+Venetians call "Sponsa solis," are all to be held in one class with the
+{119} Sunflowers; but dedicate,--the daisy to Alcestis alone; others to
+Clytia, or the Physician Apollo himself: but I can't follow their mythology
+yet awhile.
+
+3. Now in these two families you have typically Use opposed to Beauty in
+_wildness_; it is their wildness which is their virtue;--that the thyme is
+sweet where it is unthought of, and the daisies red, where the foot
+despises them: while, in other orders, wildness is their
+crime,--"Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes,
+brought it forth wild grapes?" But in all of them you must distinguish
+between the pure wildness of flowers and their distress. It may not be our
+duty to tame them; but it must be, to relieve.
+
+4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these two chapters, that I
+had examples given me of distressed and happy wildness, in immediate
+contrast. The first, I grieve to say, was in a bit of my own brushwood,
+left uncared-for evidently many a year before it became mine. I had to cut
+my way into it through a mass of thorny ruin; black, birds-nest like,
+entanglement of brittle spray round twisted stems of ill-grown birches
+strangling each other, and changing half into roots among the rock clefts;
+knotted stumps of never-blossoming blackthorn, and choked stragglings of
+holly, all laced and twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost
+unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and rose, laid over rotten
+ground through which the water soaked ceaselessly, undermining it into
+merely unctuous {120} clods and clots, knitted together by mossy sponge. It
+was all Nature's free doing! she had had her way with it to the uttermost;
+and clearly needed human help and interference in her business; and yet
+there was not one plant in the whole ruinous and deathful riot of the
+place, whose nature was not in itself wholesome and lovely; but all lost
+for want of discipline.
+
+5. The other piece of wild growth was among the fallen blocks of limestone
+under Malham Cove. Sheltered by the cliff above from stress of wind, the
+ash and hazel wood spring there in a fair and perfect freedom, without a
+diseased bough, or an unwholesome shade. I do not know why mine is all
+encumbered with overgrowth, and this so lovely that scarce a branch could
+be gathered but with injury;--while underneath, the oxalis, and the two
+smallest geraniums (Lucidum and Herb-Robert) and the mossy saxifrage, and
+the cross-leaved bed-straw, and the white pansy, wrought themselves into
+wreaths among the fallen crags, in which every leaf rejoiced, and was at
+rest.
+
+6. Now between these two states of equally natural growth, the point of
+difference that forced itself on me (and practically enough, in the work I
+had in my own wood), was not so much the withering and waste of the one,
+and the life of the other, as the thorniness and cruelty of the one, and
+the softness of the other. In Malham Cove, the stones of the brook were
+softer with moss than any silken pillow--the crowded oxalis leaves yielded
+to the pressure of the hand, and were not felt--the cloven {121} leaves of
+the Herb-Robert and orbed clusters of its companion overflowed every rent
+in the rude crags with living balm; there was scarcely a place left by the
+tenderness of the happy things, where one might not lay down one's forehead
+on their warm softness, and sleep. But in the waste and distressed ground,
+the distress had changed itself to cruelty. The leaves had all perished,
+and the bending saplings, and the wood of trust;--but the thorns were
+there, immortal, and the gnarled and sapless roots, and the dusty
+treacheries of decay.
+
+7. Of which things you will find it good to consider also otherwise than
+botanically. For all these lower organisms suffer and perish, or are
+gladdened and flourish, under conditions which are in utter precision
+symbolical, and in utter fidelity representative, of the conditions which
+induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men: and the Eternal
+Demeter,--Mother, and Judge,--brings forth, as the herb yielding seed, so
+also the thorn and the thistle, not to herself, but _to thee_.
+
+8. You have read the words of the great Law often enough;--have you ever
+thought enough of them to know the difference between these two appointed
+means of Distress? The first, the Thorn, is the type of distress _caused by
+crime_, changing the soft and breathing leaf into inflexible and wounding
+stubbornness. The second is the distress appointed to be the means and
+herald of good,--Thou shalt see the stubborn thistle bursting, into glossy
+purple, which outredden, all voluptuous garden roses. {122}
+
+9. It is strange that, after much hunting, I cannot find authentic note of
+the day when Scotland took the thistle for her emblem; and I have no space
+(in this chapter at least) for tradition; but, with whatever lightness of
+construing we may receive the symbol, it is actually the truest that could
+have been found, for some conditions of the Scottish mind. There is no
+flower which the Proserpina of our Northern Sicily cherishes more dearly:
+and scarcely any of us recognize enough the beautiful power of its
+close-set stars, and rooted radiance of ground leaves; yet the stubbornness
+and ungraceful rectitude of its stem, and the besetting of its wholesome
+substance with that fringe of offence, and the forwardness of it, and
+dominance,--I fear to lacess some of my dearest friends if I went on:--let
+them rather, with Bailie Jarvie's true conscience,[33] take their Scott
+from the inner shelf in their heart's library which all true Scotsmen give
+him, and trace, with the swift reading of memory, the characters of Fergus
+M'Ivor, Hector M'Intyre, Mause Headrigg, Alison Wilson, Richie {123}
+Moniplies, and Andrew Fairservice; and then say, if the faults of all
+these, drawn as they are with a precision of touch like a Corinthian
+sculptor's of the acanthus leaf, can be found in anything like the same
+strength in other races, or if so stubbornly folded and starched moni-plies
+of irritating kindliness, selfish friendliness, lowly conceit, and
+intolerable fidelity, are native to any other spot of the wild earth of the
+habitable globe.
+
+10. Will you note also--for this is of extreme interest--that these
+essential faults are all mean faults;--what we may call ground-growing
+faults; conditions of semi-education, of hardly-treated homelife, or of
+coarsely-minded and wandering prosperity. How literally may we go back from
+the living soul symbolized, to the strangely accurate earthly symbol, in
+the prickly weed. For if, with its bravery of endurance, and carelessness
+in choice of home, we find also definite faculty and habit of migration,
+volant mechanism for choiceless journey, not divinely directed in
+pilgrimage to known shrines; but carried at the wind's will by a Spirit
+which listeth _not_--it will go hard but that the plant shall become, if
+not dreaded, at least despised; and, in its wandering and reckless
+splendour, disgrace the garden of the sluggard, and possess the inheritance
+of the prodigal: until even its own nature seems contrary to good, and the
+invocation of the just man be made to it as the executor of Judgment, "Let
+thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley."
+
+11. Yet to be despised--either for men or flowers--may {124} be no
+ill-fortune; the real ill-fortune is only to be despicable. These faults of
+human character, wherever found, observe, belong to it as
+ill-trained--incomplete; confirm themselves only in the vulgar. There is no
+base pertinacity, no overweening conceit, in the Black Douglas, or
+Claverhouse, or Montrose; in these we find the pure Scottish temper, of
+heroic endurance and royal pride; but, when, in the pay, and not deceived,
+but purchased, idolatry of Mammon, the Scottish persistence and pride
+become knit and vested in the spleuchan, and your stiff Covenanter makes
+his covenant with Death, and your Old Mortality deciphers only the
+senseless legends of the eternal gravestone,--you get your weed,
+earth-grown, in bitter verity, and earth-devastating, in bitter strength.
+
+12. I have told you, elsewhere, we are always first to study national
+character in the highest and purest examples. But if our knowledge is to be
+complete, we have to study also the special diseases of national character.
+And in exact opposition to the most solemn virtue of Scotland, the domestic
+truth and tenderness breathed in all Scottish song, you have this special
+disease and mortal cancer, this woody-fibriness, literally, of temper and
+thought: the consummation of which into pure lignite, or rather black
+Devil's charcoal--the sap of the birks of Aberfeldy become cinder, and the
+blessed juices of them, deadly gas,--you may know in its pure blackness
+best in the work of the greatest of these ground-growing Scotchmen, Adam
+Smith. {125}
+
+13. No man of like capacity, I believe, born of any other nation, could
+have deliberately, and with no momentary shadow of suspicion or question,
+formalized the spinous and monstrous fallacy that human commerce and policy
+are _naturally_ founded on the desire of every man to possess his
+neighbour's goods.
+
+_This_ is the 'release unto us Barabbas,' with a witness; and the
+deliberate systematization of that cry, and choice, for perpetual
+repetition and fulfilment in Christian statesmanship, has been, with the
+strange precision of natural symbolism and retribution, signed, (as of old,
+by strewing of ashes on Kidron,) by strewing of ashes on the brooks of
+Scotland; waters once of life, health, music, and divine tradition; but to
+whose festering scum you may now set fire with a candle; and of which,
+round the once excelling palace of Scotland, modern sanitary science is now
+helplessly contending with the poisonous exhalations.
+
+14. I gave this chapter its heading, because I had it in my mind to work
+out the meaning of the fable in the ninth chapter of Judges, from what I
+had seen on that thorny ground of mine, where the bramble was king over all
+the trees of the wood. But the thoughts are gone from me now; and as I
+re-read the chapter of Judges,--now, except in my memory, unread, as it
+chances, for many a year,--the sadness of that story of Gideon fastens on
+me, and silences me. _This_ the end of his angel visions, and dream-led
+victories, the slaughter of all his {126} sons but this youngest,[34]--and
+he never again heard of in Israel!
+
+You Scottish children of the Rock, taught through all your once pastoral
+and noble lives by many a sweet miracle of dew on fleece and ground,--once
+servants of mighty kings, and keepers of sacred covenant; have you indeed
+dealt truly with your warrior kings, and prophet saints, or are these ruins
+of their homes, and shrines, dark with the fire that fell from the curse of
+Jerubbael?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{127}
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE STEM.
+
+1. As I read over again, with a fresh mind, the last chapter, I am struck
+by the opposition of states which seem best to fit a weed for a weed's
+work,--stubbornness, namely, and flaccidity. On the one hand, a sternness
+and a coarseness of structure which changes its stem into a stake, and its
+leaf into a spine; on the other, an utter flaccidity and ventosity of
+structure, which changes its stem into a riband, and its leaf into a
+bubble. And before we go farther--for we are not yet at the end of our
+study of these obnoxious things--we had better complete an examination of
+the parts of a plant in general, by ascertaining what a Stem proper is; and
+what makes it stiffer, or hollower, than we like it;--how, to wit, the
+gracious and generous strength of ash differs from the spinous obstinacy of
+blackthorn,--and how the geometric and enduring hollowness of a stalk of
+wheat differs from the soft fulness of that of a mushroom. To which end, I
+will take up a piece of study, not of black, but white, thorn, written last
+spring. {128}
+
+2. I suppose there is no question but that all nice people like hawthorn
+blossom.
+
+I want, if I can, to find out to-day, 25th May, 1875, what it is we like it
+so much for: holding these two branches of it in my hand--one full out, the
+other in youth. This full one is a mere mass of symmetrically
+balanced--snow, one was going vaguely to write, in the first impulse. But
+it is nothing of the sort. White,--yes, in a high degree; and pure,
+totally; but not at all dazzling in the white, nor pure in an insultingly
+rivalless manner, as snow would be; yet pure somehow, certainly; and white,
+absolutely, in spite of what might be thought failure,--imperfection--nay,
+even distress and loss in it. For every little rose of it has a green
+darkness in the centre--not even a pretty green, but a faded, yellowish,
+glutinous, unaccomplished green; and round that, all over the surface of
+the blossom, whose shell-like petals are themselves deep sunk, with grey
+shadows in the hollows of them--all above this already subdued brightness,
+are strewn the dark points of the dead stamens--manifest more and more, the
+longer one looks, as a kind of grey sand, sprinkled without sparing over
+what looked at first unspotted light. And in all the ways of it the lovely
+thing is more like the spring frock of some prudent little maid of
+fourteen, than a flower;--frock with some little spotty pattern on it to
+keep it from showing an unintended and inadvertent spot,--if Fate should
+ever inflict such a thing! Undeveloped, thinks Mr. Darwin,--the poor {129}
+short-coming, ill-blanched thorn blossom--going to be a Rose, some day
+soon; and, what next?--who knows?--perhaps a Paeony!
+
+3. Then this next branch, in dawn and delight of youth, set with opening
+clusters of yet numerable blossom, four, and five, and seven, edged, and
+islanded, and ended, by the sharp leaves of freshest green, deepened under
+the flowers, and studded round with bosses, better than pearl beads of St.
+Agnes' rosary,--folded, over and over, with the edges of their little
+leaves pouting, as the very softest waves do on flat sand where one meets
+another; then opening just enough to show the violet colour within--which
+yet isn't violet colour, nor even "meno che le rose," but a different
+colour from every other lilac that one ever saw;--faint and faded even
+before it sees light, as the filmy cup opens over the depth of it, then
+broken into purple motes of tired bloom, fading into darkness, as the cup
+extends into the perfect rose.
+
+This, with all its sweet change that one would so fain stay, and soft
+effulgence of bud into softly falling flower, one has watched--how often;
+but always with the feeling that the blossoms are thrown over the green
+depth like white clouds--never with any idea of so much as asking what
+holds the cloud there. Have each of the innumerable blossoms a separate
+stalk? and, if so, how is it that one never thinks of the stalk, as one
+does with currants?
+
+4. Turn the side of the branch to you;--Nature never meant you to see it
+so; but now it is all stalk below, and {130} stamens above,--the petals
+nothing, the stalks all tiny trees, always dividing their branches mainly
+into three--one in the centre short, and the two lateral, long, with an
+intermediate extremely long one, if needed, to fill a gap, so contriving
+that the flowers shall all be nearly at the same level, or at least surface
+of ball, like a guelder rose. But the cunning with which the tree conceals
+its structure till the blossom is fallen, and then--for a little while, we
+had best look no more at it, for it is all like grape-stalks with no
+grapes.
+
+These, whether carrying hawthorn blossom and haw, or grape blossom and
+grape, or peach blossom and peach, you will simply call the 'stalk,'
+whether of flower or fruit. A 'stalk' is essentially round, like a pillar;
+and has, for the most part, the power of first developing, and then shaking
+off, flower and fruit from its extremities. You can pull the peach from its
+stalk, the cherry, the grape. Always at some time of its existence, the
+flower-stalk lets fall something of what it sustained, petal or seed.
+
+In late Latin it is called 'petiolus,' the little foot; because the
+expanding piece that holds the grape, or olive, is a little like an
+animal's foot. Modern botanists have misapplied the word to the
+_leaf_-stalk, which has no resemblance to a foot at all. We must keep the
+word to its proper meaning, and, when we want to write Latin, call it
+'petiolus;' when we want to write English, call it 'stalk,' meaning always
+fruit or flower stalk. {131}
+
+I cannot find when the word 'stalk' first appears in English:--its
+derivation will be given presently.
+
+5. Gather next a hawthorn leaf. That also has a stalk; but you can't shake
+the leaf off it. It, and the leaf, are essentially one; for the sustaining
+fibre runs up into every ripple or jag of the leaf's edge: and its section
+is different from that of the flower-stalk; it is no more round, but has an
+upper and under surface, quite different from each other. It will be
+better, however, to take a larger leaf to examine this structure in.
+Cabbage, cauliflower, or rhubarb, would any of them be good, but don't grow
+wild in the luxuriance I want. So, if you please, we will take a leaf of
+burdock, (Arctium Lappa,) the principal business of that plant being
+clearly to grow leaves wherewith to adorn fore-grounds.[35]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 13.]
+
+6. The outline of it in Sowerby is not an intelligent one, and I have not
+time to draw it but in the rudest way myself; Fig. 13, _a_; with
+perspectives of the elementary form below, _b_, _c_, and d. By help of
+which, if you will construct a burdock leaf in paper, my rude outline (_a_)
+may tell the rest of what I want you to see.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 14.]
+
+Take a sheet of stout note paper, Fig. 14, A, double it sharply down the
+centre, by the dotted line, then give it the two cuts at _a_ and _b_, and
+double those pieces sharply back, as at B; then, opening them again, cut
+the whole {132} into the form C; and then, pulling up the corners _c d_,
+stitch them together with a loose thread so that the points _c_ and _d_
+shall be within half an inch of each other; and you will have a kind of
+triangular scoop, or shovel, with a stem, by which you can sufficiently
+hold it, D.
+
+7. And from this easily constructed and tenable model, you may learn at
+once these following main facts about all leaves. {133}
+
+[I.] That they are not flat, but, however slightly, always hollowed into
+craters, or raised into hills, in one or another direction; so that any
+drawable outline of them does not in the least represent the real extent of
+their surfaces; and until you know how to draw a cup, or a mountain,
+rightly, you have no chance of drawing a leaf. My simple artist readers of
+long ago, when I told them to draw leaves, thought they could do them by
+the boughfull, whenever they liked. Alas, except by old William Hunt, and
+Burne Jones, I've not seen a leaf painted, since those burdocks of
+Turner's; far less sculptured--though one would think at first that was
+easier! Of which we shall have talk elsewhere; here I must go on to note
+fact number two, concerning leaves.
+
+{134}
+
+8. [II.] The strength of their supporting stem consists not merely in the
+gathering together of all the fibres, but in gathering them essentially
+into the profile of the letter V, which you will see your doubled paper
+stem has; and of which you can feel the strength and use, in your hand, as
+you hold it. Gather a common plantain leaf, and look at the way it puts its
+round ribs together at the base, and you will understand the matter at
+once. The arrangement is modified and disguised in every possible way,
+according to the leaf's need: in the aspen, the leaf-stalk becomes an
+absolute vertical plank; and in the large trees is often almost rounded
+into the likeness of a fruit-stalk;--but, in all,[36] the essential
+structure is this doubled one; and in all, it opens at the place where the
+leaf joins the main stem, into a kind of cup, which holds next year's bud
+in the hollow of it.
+
+9. Now there would be no inconvenience in your simply getting into the
+habit of calling the round petiol of the fruit the 'stalk,' and the
+contracted channel of the leaf, 'leaf-stalk.' But this way of naming them
+would not enforce, nor fasten in your mind, the difference between the two,
+so well as if you have an entirely different name for the leaf-stalk. Which
+is the more desirable, because the limiting character of the leaf,
+botanically, is--(I only learned this from my botanical friend the other
+day, just {135} in the very moment I wanted it,)--that it holds the bud of
+the new stem in its own hollow, but cannot itself grow in the hollow of
+anything else;--or, in botanical language, leaves are never
+axillary,--don't grow in armpits, but are themselves armpits; hollows, that
+is to say, where they spring from the main stem.
+
+10. Now there is already a received and useful botanical word, 'cyme'
+(which we shall want in a little while.) derived from the Greek [Greek:
+kuma], a swelling or rising wave, and used to express a swelling cluster of
+foamy blossom. Connected with that word, but in a sort the reverse of it,
+you have the Greek '[Greek: kumbe],' the _hollow_ of a cup, or bowl; whence
+[Greek: kumbalou], a cymbal,--that is to say, a musical instrument owing
+its tone to its _hollowness_. These words become in Latin, cymba, and
+cymbalum; and I think you will find it entirely convenient and advantageous
+to call the leaf-stalk distinctively the 'cymba,' retaining the mingled
+idea of cup and boat, with respect at least to the part of it that holds
+the bud; and understanding that it gathers itself into a V-shaped, or even
+narrowly vertical, section, as a boat narrows to its bow, for strength to
+sustain the leaf.
+
+With this word you may learn the Virgilian line, that shows the final use
+of iron--or iron-darkened--ships:
+
+ "Et ferruginea subvectat corpora cymba."
+
+The "subvectat corpora" will serve to remind you of the office of the leafy
+cymba in carrying the bud; and make {136} you thankful that the said leafy
+vase is not of iron; and is a ship of Life instead of Death.
+
+11. Already, not once, nor twice, I have had to use the word 'stem,' of the
+main round branch from which both stalk and cymba spring. This word you had
+better keep for all growing, or advancing, shoots of trees, whether from
+the ground, or from central trunks and branches. I regret that the words
+multiply on us; but each that I permit myself to use has its own proper
+thought or idea to express, as you will presently perceive; so that true
+knowledge multiplies with true words.
+
+12. The 'stem,' you are to say, then, when you mean the _advancing_
+shoot,--which lengthens annually, while a stalk ends every year in a
+blossom, and a cymba in a leaf. A stem is essentially round,[37] square, or
+regularly polygonal; though, as a cymba may become exceptionally round, a
+stem may become exceptionally flat, or even mimic the shape of a leaf.
+Indeed I should have liked to write "a stem is essentially round, and
+constructively, on occasion, square,"--but it would have been too grand.
+The fact is, however, that a stem is really a roundly minded thing,
+throwing off its branches in circles as a trundled mop throws off drops,
+though it can always order the branches to fly off in what order it
+likes,--two at a time, opposite to each other; or three, or five, in a
+spiral coil; or one here and one there, on this side and that; {137} but it
+is always twisting, in its own inner mind and force; hence it is especially
+proper to use the word 'stem' of it--[Greek: stemma], a twined wreath;
+properly, twined round a staff, or sceptre: therefore, learn at once by
+heart these lines in the opening Iliad:
+
+     "[Greek: Stemmat' echon en chersin hekebolou Apollonos,]
+  [Greek: Chruseoi ana skeptroi;]"
+
+And recollect that a sceptre is properly a staff to lean upon; and that as
+a crown or diadem is first a binding thing, a 'sceptre' is first a
+_supporting_ thing, and it is in its nobleness, itself made of the stem of
+a young tree. You may just as well learn also this:
+
+ "[Greek: Nai ma tode skeptron, to men oupote phulla kai ozous]
+  [Greek: Phusei, epeide prota tomen en oressi leloipen,]
+  [Greek: Oud' anathelesei; peri gar rha he chalkos elepse]
+  [Greek: Phulla te kai phloion; nun aute min huies Achaion]
+  [Greek: En palameis phoreousi dikaspoloi, hoi te themistas]
+  [Greek: Pros Dios eiruatai;]"
+
+ "Now, by this sacred sceptre hear me swear
+  Which never more shall leaves or blossoms bear,
+  Which, severed from the trunk, (as I from thee,)
+  On the bare mountains left its parent tree;
+  This sceptre, formed by tempered steel to prove
+  An ensign of the delegates of Jove,
+  From whom the power of laws and justice springs
+  (Tremendous oath, inviolate to Kings)."
+
+13. The supporting power in the tree itself is, I doubt not, greatly
+increased by this spiral action; and the fine {138} instinct of its being
+so, caused the twisted pillar to be used in the Lombardic Gothic,--at
+first, merely as a pleasant variety of form, but at last constructively and
+universally, by Giotto, and all the architects of his school. Not that the
+spiral form actually adds to the strength of a Lombardic pillar, by
+imitating contortions of wood, any more than the fluting of a Doric shaft
+adds to its strength by imitating the canaliculation of a reed; but the
+perfect action of the imagination, which had adopted the encircling
+acanthus for the capital, adopted the twining stemma for the shaft; the
+pure delight of the eye being the first condition in either case: and it is
+inconceivable how much of the pleasure taken both in ornament and in
+natural form is founded elementarily on groups of spiral line. The study in
+our fifth plate, of the involucre of the waste-thistle,[38] is as good an
+example as I can give of the more subtle and concealed conditions of this
+structure.
+
+14. Returning to our present business of nomenclature, we find the Greek
+word, 'stemma,' adopted by the Latins, {139} becoming the expression of a
+growing and hereditary race; and the branched tree, the natural type, among
+all nations, of multiplied families. Hence the entire fitness of the word
+for our present purposes; as signifying, "a spiral shoot extending itself
+by branches." But since, unless it is spiral, it is not a stem, and unless
+it has branches, it is not a stem, we shall still want another word for the
+sustaining 'sceptre' of a foxglove, or cowslip. Before determining that,
+however, we must see what need there may be of one familiar to our ears
+until lately, although now, I understand, falling into disuse.
+
+15. By our definition, a stem is a spirally bent, essentially living and
+growing, shoot of vegetation. But the branch of a tree, in which many such
+stems have their origin, is not, except in a very subtle and partial way,
+spiral; nor, except in the shoots that spring from it, progressive
+forwards; it only receives increase of thickness at its sides. Much more,
+what used to be called the _trunk_ of a tree, in which many branches are
+united, has ceased to be, except in mere tendency and temper, spiral; and
+has so far ceased from growing as to be often in a state of decay in its
+interior, while the external layers are still in serviceable strength.
+
+16. If, however, a trunk were only to be defined as an arrested stem, or a
+cluster of arrested stems, we might perhaps refuse, in scientific use, the
+popular word. But such a definition does not touch the main idea. Branches
+usually begin to assert themselves at a height above the {140} ground
+approximately fixed for each species of tree,--low in an oak, high in a
+stone pine; but, in both, marked as a point of _structural change in the
+direction of growing force_, like the spring of a vault from a pillar; and
+as the tree grows old, some of its branches getting torn away by winds or
+falling under the weight of their own fruit, or load of snow, or by natural
+decay, there remains literally a 'truncated' mass of timber, still bearing
+irregular branches here and there, but inevitably suggestive of resemblance
+to a human body, after the loss of some of its limbs.
+
+And to prepare trees for their practical service, what age and storm only
+do partially, the first rough process of human art does completely. The
+branches are lopped away, leaving literally the 'truncus' as the part of
+the tree out of which log and rafter can be cut. And in many trees, it
+would appear to be the chief end of their being to produce this part of
+their body on a grand scale, and of noble substance; so that, while in
+thinking of vegetable life without reference to its use to men or animals,
+we should rightly say that the essence of it was in leaf and flower--not in
+trunk or fruit; yet for the sake of animals, we find that some plants, like
+the vine, are apparently meant chiefly to produce fruit; others, like
+laurels, chiefly to produce leaves; others chiefly to produce flowers; and
+others to produce permanently serviceable and sculptural wood; or, in some
+cases, merely picturesque and monumental masses of vegetable rock,
+"intertwisted {141} fibres serpentine,"--of far nobler and more pathetic
+use in their places, and their enduring age, than ever they could be for
+material purpose in human habitation. For this central mass of the
+vegetable organism, then, the English word 'trunk' and French 'tronc' are
+always in accurate scholarship to be retained--meaning the part of a tree
+which remains when its branches are lopped away.
+
+17. We have now got distinct ideas of four different kinds of stem, and
+simple names for them in Latin and English,--Petiolus, Cymba, Stemma, and
+Truncus; Stalk, Leaf-stalk, Stem, and Trunk; and these are all that we
+shall commonly need. There is, however, one more that will be sometimes
+necessary, though it is ugly and difficult to pronounce, and must be as
+little used as we can.
+
+And here I must ask you to learn with me a little piece of Roman history. I
+say, to _learn_ with me, because I don't know any Roman history except the
+two first books of Livy, and little bits here and there of the following
+six or seven. I only just know enough about it to be able to make out the
+bearings and meaning of any fact that I now learn. The greater number of
+modern historians know, (if honest enough even for that,) the facts, or
+something that may possibly be like the facts, but haven't the least notion
+of the meaning of them. So that, though I have to find out everything that
+I want in Smith's dictionary, like any schoolboy, I can usually tell you
+the {142} significance of what I so find, better than perhaps even Mr.
+Smith himself could.
+
+18. In the 586th page of Mr. Smith's volume, you have it written that
+'Calvus,' bald-head, was the name of a family of the Licinia gens; that the
+man of whom we hear earliest, as so named, was the first plebeian elected
+to military tribuneship in B.C. 400; and that the fourth of whom we hear,
+was surnamed 'Stolo,' because he was so particular in pruning away the
+Stolons (stolones), or useless young shoots, of his vines.
+
+We must keep this word 'stolon,' therefore, for these young suckers
+springing from an old root. Its derivation is uncertain; but the main idea
+meant by it is one of uselessness,--sprouting without occasion or fruit;
+and the words 'stolidus' and 'stolid' are really its derivatives, though we
+have lost their sense in English by partly confusing them with 'solid'
+which they have nothing to do with. A 'stolid' person is essentially a
+'useless sucker' of society; frequently very leafy and graceful, but with
+no good in him.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 15.]
+
+19. Nevertheless, I won't allow our vegetable 'stolons' to be despised.
+Some of quite the most beautiful forms of leafage belong to them;--even the
+foliage of the olive itself is never seen to the same perfection on the
+upper branches as in the young ground-rods in which the dual groups of
+leaves crowd themselves in their haste into clusters of three.
+
+But, for our point of Latin history, remember always {143} that in 400
+B.C., just a year before the death of Socrates at Athens, this family of
+Stolid persons manifested themselves at Rome, shooting up from plebeian
+roots into places where they had no business; and preparing the way for the
+degradation of the entire Roman race under the Empire; their success being
+owed, remember also, to the faults of the patricians, for one of the laws
+passed by Calvus Stolo was that the Sibylline books should be in custody of
+ten men, of whom five should be plebeian, "that no falsifications might be
+introduced in favour of the patricians."
+
+20. All this time, however, we have got no name for the prettiest of all
+stems,--that of annual flowers growing high from among their ground leaves,
+like lilies of the valley, and saxifrages, and the tall primulas--of which
+this pretty type, Fig. 15, was cut for me by Mr. Burgess years ago;
+admirable in its light outline of the foamy globe of flowers, supported and
+balanced in the meadow breezes on that elastic rod of slenderest life.
+
+What shall we call it? We had better rest from our study of terms a little,
+and do a piece of needful classifying, before we try to name it.
+
+21. My younger readers will find it easy to learn, and convenient to
+remember, for a beginning of their science, {144} the names of twelve great
+families of cinquefoiled flowers,[39] of which the first group of three, is
+for the most part golden, the second, blue, the third, purple, and the
+fourth, red.
+
+And their names, by simple lips, can be pleasantly said, or sung, in this
+order, the two first only being a little difficult to get over.
+
+      1          2            3          4
+
+  Roof-foil,    Lucy,        Pea,       Pink,
+  Rock-foil,    Blue-bell,   Pansy,     Peach,
+  Primrose.     Bindweed.    Daisy.     Rose.
+
+Which even in their Latin magniloquence will not be too terrible, namely,--
+
+     1           2           3            4
+
+  Stella,     Lucia,       Alata,       Clarissa,
+  Francesca,  Campanula,   Viola,       Persica,
+  Primula.    Convoluta.   Margarita.   Rosa.
+
+22. I do not care much to assert or debate my reasons for the changes of
+nomenclature made in this list. The {145} most gratuitous is that of 'Lucy'
+for 'Gentian,' because the King of Macedon, from whom the flower has been
+so long named, was by no means a person deserving of so consecrated memory.
+I conceive no excuse needed for rejecting Caryophyll, one of the crudest
+and absurdest words ever coined by unscholarly men of science; or
+Papilionaceae, which is unendurably long for pease; and when we are now
+writing Latin, in a sentimental temper, and wish to say that we gathered a
+daisy, we shall not any more be compelled to write that we gathered a
+'Bellidem perennem,' or, an 'Oculum Diei.'
+
+I take the pure Latin form, Margarita, instead of Margareta, in memory of
+Margherita of Cortona,[40] as well as of the great saint: also the tiny
+scatterings and sparklings of the daisy on the turf may remind us of the
+old use of the word 'Margaritae,' for the minute particles of the Host
+sprinkled on the patina--"Has particulas [Greek: meridas] vocat
+Euchologium, [Greek: margaritas] Liturgia Chrysostomi."[41] My young German
+readers will, I hope, call the flower Gretschen,--unless they would uproot
+the daisies of the Rhine, lest French girls should also count their
+love-lots by the Marguerite. I must be so ungracious to my fair young
+readers, however, as to warn them that this trial of their lovers is a very
+favourable one, for, in nine blossoms out of {146} ten, the leaves of the
+Marguerite are odd, so that, if they are only gracious enough to begin with
+the supposition that he loves them, they must needs end in the conviction
+of it.
+
+23. I am concerned, however, for the present, only with my first or golden
+order, of which the Roof-foil, or house-leek, is called in present botany,
+Sedum, 'the squatter,' because of its way of fastening itself down on
+stones, or roof, as close as it can sit. But I think this an ungraceful
+notion of its behaviour; and as its blossoms are, of all flowers, the most
+sharply and distinctly star-shaped, I shall call it 'Stella' (providing
+otherwise, in due time, for the poor little chickweeds;) and the common
+stonecrop will therefore be 'Stella domestica.'
+
+The second tribe, (at present saxifraga,) growing for the most part wild on
+rocks, may, I trust, even in Protestant botany, be named Francesca, after
+St. Francis of Assisi; not only for its modesty, and love of mountain
+ground, and poverty of colour and leaf; but also because the chief element
+of its decoration, seen close, will be found in its spots, or stigmata.
+
+In the nomenclature of the third order I make no change.
+
+24. Now all this group of golden-blossoming plants agree in general
+character of having a rich cluster of radical leaves, from which they throw
+up a single stalk bearing clustered blossoms; for which stalk, when
+entirely leafless, I intend always to keep the term 'virgula,' the {147}
+'little rod'--not painfully caring about it, but being able thus to define
+it with precision, if required. And these are connected with the stems of
+branching shrubs through infinite varieties of structure, in which the
+first steps of transition are made by carrying the cluster of radical
+leaves up, and letting them expire gradually from the rising stem: the
+changes of form in the leaves as they rise higher from the ground being one
+of quite the most interesting specific studies in every plant. I had set
+myself once, in a bye-study for foreground drawing, hard on this point; and
+began, with Mr. Burgess, a complete analysis of the foliation of annual
+stems; of which Line-studies II., III., and IV., are examples; reduced
+copies, all, from the beautiful Flora Danica. But after giving two whole
+lovely long summer days, under the Giesbach, to the blue scabious,
+('Devil's bit,') and getting in that time, only half-way up it, I gave in;
+and must leave the work to happier and younger souls.
+
+25. For these flowering stems, therefore, possessing nearly all the complex
+organization of a tree, but not its permanence, we will keep the word
+'virga;' and 'virgula' for those that have no leaves. I believe, when we
+come to the study of leaf-order, it will be best to begin with these annual
+virgae, in which the leaf has nothing to do with preparation for a next
+year's branch. And now the remaining terms commonly applied to stems may be
+for the most part dispensed with; but several are interesting, and must be
+examined before dismissal. {148}
+
+26. Indeed, in the first place, the word we have to use so often, 'stalk,'
+has not been got to the roots of, yet. It comes from the Greek [Greek:
+stelechos,] (stelechos,) the 'holding part' of a tree, that which is like a
+handle to all its branches; 'stock' is another form in which it has come
+down to us: with some notion of its being the mother of branches: thus,
+when Athena's olive was burnt by the Persians, two days after, a shoot a
+cubit long had sprung from the 'stelechos,' of it.
+
+27. Secondly. Few words are more interesting to the modern scholarly and
+professorial mind than 'stipend.' (I have twice a year at present to
+consider whether I am worth mine, sent with compliments from the Curators
+of the University chest). Now, this word comes from 'stips,' small pay,
+which itself comes from 'stipo,' to press together, with the idea of small
+coin heaped up in little towers or piles. But with the idea of lateral
+pressing together, instead of downward, we get 'stipes,' a solid log; in
+Greek, with the same sense, [Greek: stupos,] (stupos,) whence, gradually,
+with help from another word meaning to beat, (and a side-glance at beating
+of hemp,) we get our 'stupid,' the German stumph, the Scottish sumph, and
+the plain English 'stump.'
+
+Refining on the more delicate sound of stipes, the Latins got 'stipula,'
+the thin stem of straw: which rustles and ripples daintily in verse,
+associated with spica and spiculum, used of the sharp pointed ear of corn,
+and its fine processes of fairy shafts. {149}
+
+28. There are yet two more names of stalk to be studied, though, except for
+particular plants, not needing to be used,--namely, the Latin cau-dex, and
+cau-lis, both connected with the Greek [Greek: kaulos], properly meaning a
+solid stalk like a handle, passing into the sense of the hilt of a sword,
+or quill of a pen. Then, in Latin, caudex passes into the sense of log, and
+so, of cut plank or tablet of wood; thus finally becoming the classical
+'codex' of writings engraved on such wooden tablets, and therefore
+generally used for authoritative manuscripts.
+
+Lastly, 'caulis,' retained accurately in our cauliflower, contracted in
+'colewort,' and refined in 'kail,' softens itself into the French 'chou,'
+meaning properly the whole family of thick-stalked eatable salads with
+spreading heads; but these being distinguished explicitly by Pliny as
+'Capitati,' 'salads with a head,' or 'Captain salads,' the mediaeval French
+softened the 'caulis capitatus' into 'chou cabus;'--or, to separate the
+round or apple-like mass of leaves from the flowery foam, 'cabus' simply,
+by us at last enriched and emphasized into 'cabbage.'
+
+29. I believe we have now got through the stiffest piece of etymology we
+shall have to master in the course of our botany; but I am certain that
+young readers will find patient work, in this kind, well rewarded by the
+groups of connected thoughts which will thus attach themselves to familiar
+names; and their grasp of every language they learn must only be esteemed
+by them secure when they recognize its derivatives in these homely
+associations, {150} and are as much at ease with the Latin or French
+syllables of a word as with the English ones; this familiarity being above
+all things needful to cure our young students of their present ludicrous
+impression that what is simple, in English, is knowing, in Greek; and that
+terms constructed out of a dead language will explain difficulties which
+remained insoluble in a living one. But Greek is _not_ yet dead: while if
+we carry our unscholarly nomenclature much further, English soon will be;
+and then doubtless botanical gentlemen at Athens will for some time think
+it fine to describe what we used to call caryophyllaceae, as the [Greek:
+hedlephides].
+
+30. For indeed we are all of us yet but school-boys, clumsily using alike
+our lips and brains; and with all our mastery of instruments and patience
+of attention, but few have reached, and those dimly, the first level of
+science,--wonder.
+
+For the first instinct of the stem,--unnamed by us yet--unthought of,--the
+instinct of seeking light, as of the root to seek darkness,--what words can
+enough speak the wonder of it.
+
+Look. Here is the little thing, Line-study V. (A), in its first birth to
+us: the stem of stems; the one of which we pray that it may bear our daily
+bread. The seed has fallen in the ground with the springing germ of it
+downwards; with heavenly cunning the taught stem curls round, and seeks the
+never-seen light. Veritable 'conversion,' miraculous, called of God. And
+here is the oat {151} germ, (B)--after the wheat, most vital of divine
+gifts; and assuredly, in days to come, fated to grow on many a naked rock
+in hitherto lifeless lands, over which the glancing sheaves of it will
+shake sweet treasure of innocent gold.
+
+And who shall tell us how they grow; and the fashion of their rustling
+pillars--bent, and again erect, at every breeze. Fluted shaft or clustered
+pier, how poor of art, beside this grass-shaft--built, first to sustain the
+food of men, then to be strewn under their feet!
+
+We must not stay to think of it, yet, or we shall get no farther till
+harvest has come and gone again. And having our names of stems now
+determined enough, we must in next chapter try a little to understand the
+different kinds of them.
+
+The following notes, among many kindly sent me on the subject of Scottish
+Heraldry, seem to be the most trustworthy:--
+
+    "The earliest known mention of the thistle as the national badge of
+    Scotland is in the inventory of the effects of James III., who probably
+    adopted it as an appropriate illustration of the royal motto, _In
+    defence_.
+
+    "Thistles occur on the coins of James IV., Mary, James V., and James
+    VI.; and on those of James VI. they are for the first time accompanied
+    by the motto, _Nemo me impune lacesset_.
+
+    "A collar of thistles appears on the gold bonnet-pieces of James V. of
+    1539; and the royal ensigns, as depicted in Sir David Lindsay's
+    armorial register of 1542, are surrounded by a collar formed entirely
+    of golden thistles, with an oval badge attached. {152}
+
+    "This collar, however, was a mere device until the institution, or as
+    it is generally but inaccurately called, the revival, of the order of
+    the Thistle by James VII. (II. of England), which took place on May 29,
+    1687."
+
+    Date of James III.'s reign 1460-1488.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{153}
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+OUTSIDE AND IN.
+
+1. The elementary study of methods of growth, given in the following
+chapter, has been many years written, (the greater part soon after the
+fourth volume of 'Modern Painters'); and ought now to be rewritten
+entirely; but having no time to do this, I leave it with only a word or two
+of modification, because some truth and clearness of incipient notion will
+be conveyed by it to young readers, from which I can afterwards lop the
+errors, and into which I can graft the finer facts, better than if I had a
+less blunt embryo to begin with.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 16.]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
+
+2. A stem, then, broadly speaking, (I had thus began the old chapter,) is
+the channel of communication between the leaf and root; and if the leaf can
+grow directly from the root there is no stem: so that it is well first to
+conceive of all plants as consisting of leaves and roots only, with the
+condition that each leaf must have its own quite particular root[42]
+somewhere. {154} Let a b c, Fig. 16, be three leaves, each, as you see,
+with its own root, and by no means dependent on other leaves for its daily
+bread; and let the horizontal line be the surface of the ground. Then the
+plant has no stem, or an underground one. But if the three leaves rise
+above the ground, as in Fig. 17, they must reach their roots by elongating
+their stalks, and this elongation is the stem of the plant. If the outside
+leaves grow last, and are therefore youngest, the plant is said to grow
+from the outside. You know that 'ex' means out, and that 'gen' is the first
+syllable of Genesis (or creation), therefore the old botanists, putting an
+o between the two syllables, called plants whose outside leaves grew last,
+Ex-o-gens. If the inside leaf grows last, and is youngest, the plant was
+said to grow from the inside, and from the Greek Endon, within, called an
+'Endo-gen.' If these names are persisted in, the Greek botanists, to return
+the compliment, will of course call Endogens [Greek: Inseidbornides], and
+Exogens [Greek: Houtseidbornides]. In the Oxford school, they will be
+called simply Inlaid and Outlaid.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
+
+3. You see that if the outside leaves are to grow last, they may
+conveniently grow two at a time; which they accordingly do, and exogens
+always start with two little {155} leaves from their roots, and may
+therefore conveniently be called two-leaved; which, if you please, we will
+for our parts call them. The botanists call them 'two-suckered,' and can't
+be content to call them _that_ in English; but drag in a long Greek word,
+meaning the fleshy sucker of the sea-devil,--'cotyledon,' which, however, I
+find is practically getting shortened into 'cot,' and that they will have
+to end by calling endogens, monocots, and exogens, bicots. I mean steadily
+to call them one-leaved and two-leaved, for this further reason, that they
+differ not merely in the single or dual springing of first leaves from the
+seed; but in the distinctly single or dual arrangement of leaves afterwards
+on the stem; so that, through all the complexity obtained by alternate and
+spiral placing, every bicot or two-leaved flower or tree is in reality
+composed of dual groups of leaves, separated by a given length of stem; as,
+most characteristically in this pure mountain type of the Ragged Robin
+(Clarissa laciniosa), Fig. 18; and compare A, and B, Line-study II.; while,
+on the other hand, the monocot plants are by close analysis, I think,
+always resolvable into successively climbing leaves, sessile on one
+another, and sending their roots, {156} or processes, for nourishment, down
+through one another, as in Fig. 19.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
+
+4. Not that I am yet clear, at all, myself; but I do think it's more the
+botanists' fault than mine, what 'cotyledonous' structure there may be at
+the outer base of each successive bud; and still less, how the intervenient
+length of stem, in the bicots, is related to their power, or law, of
+branching. For not only the two-leaved tree is outlaid, and the one-leaved
+inlaid, but the two-leaved tree is branched, and the one-leaved tree is not
+branched. This is a most vital and important distinction, which I state to
+you in very bold terms, for though there are some apparent exceptions to
+the law, there are, I believe, no real ones, if we define a branch rightly.
+Thus, the head of a palm tree is merely a cluster of large leaves; and the
+spike of a grass, a clustered blossom. The stem, in both, is unbranched;
+and we should be able in this respect to classify plants very simply
+indeed, but for a provoking species of intermediate creatures whose
+branching is always in the manner of corals, or sponges, or arborescent
+minerals, irregular and accidental, and essentially, therefore,
+distinguished from the systematic anatomy of a truly branched tree. Of
+these presently; we must go on by very short steps: and I find no step can
+be taken without check from existing generalizations. Sowerby's definition
+of Monocotyledons, in his ninth volume, begins thus: "Herbs, (or rarely,
+and only in exotic genera,) trees, in which the wood, pith, and bark are
+indistinguishable." {157} Now if there be one plant more than another in
+which the pith is defined, it is the common Rush; while the nobler families
+of true herbs derive their principal character from being pithless
+altogether! We cannot advance too slowly.
+
+5. In the families of one-leaved plants in which the young leaves grow
+directly out of the old ones, it becomes a grave question for them whether
+the old ones are to lie flat or edgeways, and whether they must therefore
+grow out of their faces or their edges. And we must at once understand the
+way they contrive it, in either case.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 20.]
+
+Among the many forms taken by the Arethusan leaf, one of the commonest is
+long and gradually tapering,--much broader at the base than the point. We
+will take such an one for examination, and suppose that it is growing on
+the ground as in Fig. 20, with a root to its every fibre. Cut out a piece
+of strong paper roughly into the shape of this Arethusan leaf, a, Fig. 21.
+Now suppose the next young leaf has to spring out of the front of this one,
+at about the middle of its height. Give it two nicks with the scissors at b
+b; then roll up the lower part into a cylinder, (it will overlap a good
+deal at the bottom,) and tie it fast with a fine thread: so, you will get
+the form at c. Then bend the top of it back, so that, seen sideways, it
+appears as at d, and you see you have made quite a little flower-pot to
+plant your {158} new leaf in, and perhaps it may occur to you that you have
+seen something like this before. Now make another, a little less wide, but
+with the part for the cylinder twice as long, roll it up in the same way,
+and slip it inside the other, with the flat part turned the other way, e.
+Surely this reminds you now of something you have seen? Or must I draw the
+something (Fig. 22)?
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
+
+6. All grasses are thus constructed, and have their leaves set thus,
+opposite, on the sides of their tubular stems, alternately, as they ascend.
+But in most of them there is also a peculiar construction, by which, at the
+base of the sheath, or enclosing tube, each leaf articulates itself with
+the rest of the stem at a ringed knot, or joint. {159}
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 22.]
+
+Before examining these, remember there are mainly two sorts of joints in
+the framework of the bodies of animals. One is that in which the bone is
+thick at the joints and thin between them, (see the bone of the next
+chicken leg you eat), the other is that of animals that have shells or
+horny coats, in which characteristically the shell is thin at the joints,
+and thick between them (look at the next lobster's claw you can see,
+without eating). You know, also, that though the crustaceous are titled
+only from their crusts, the name 'insect' is given to the whole insect
+tribe, because they are farther jointed almost into _sect_ions: it is
+easily remembered, also, that the projecting joint means strength and
+elasticity in the creature, and that all its limbs are useful to it, and
+cannot conveniently be parted with; and that the incised, sectional, or
+insectile joint means more or less weakness,[43] and necklace-like laxity
+or license in the creature's make; and an ignoble power of shaking off its
+legs or arms on occasion, coupled also with modes of growth involving
+occasionally quite astonishing transformations, and beginnings of new life
+under new circumstances; so that, until very lately, no mortal knew what a
+crab was like in its youth, the very existence {160} of the creature, as
+well as its legs, being jointed, as it were and made in separate pieces
+with the narrowest possible thread of connection between them; and its
+principal, or stomachic, period of life, connected with its sentimental
+period by as thin a thread as a wasp's stomach is with its thorax.
+
+7. Now in plants, as in animals, there are just the same opposed aspects of
+joint, with this specialty of difference in function, that the animal's
+limb bends at the joints, but the vegetable limb stiffens. And when the
+articulation projects, as in the joint of a cane, it means not only that
+the strength of the plant is well carried through the junction, but is
+carried farther and more safely than it could be without it: a cane is
+stronger, and can stand higher than it could otherwise, because of its
+joints. Also, this structure implies that the plant has a will of its own,
+and a position which on the whole it will keep, however it may now and then
+be bent out of it; and that it has a continual battle, of a healthy and
+humanlike kind, to wage with surrounding elements.
+
+But the crabby, or insect-like, joint, which you get in seaweeds and cacti,
+means either that the plant is to be dragged and wagged here and there at
+the will of waves, and to have no spring nor mind of its own; or else that
+it has at least no springy intention and elasticity of purpose, but only a
+knobby, knotty, prickly, malignant stubbornness, and incoherent
+opiniativeness; crawling about, and coggling, and grovelling, and
+aggregating {161} anyhow, like the minds of so many people whom one knows!
+
+8. Returning then to our grasses, in which the real rooting and junction of
+the leaves with each other is at these joints; we find that therefore every
+leaf of grass may be thought of as consisting of two main parts, for which
+we shall want two separate names. The lowest part, which wraps itself round
+to become strong, we will call the 'staff,' and for the free-floating outer
+part we will take specially the name given at present carelessly to a large
+number of the plants themselves, 'flag.' This will give a more clear
+meaning to the words 'rod' (virga), and 'staff' (baculus), when they occur
+together, as in the 23rd Psalm; and remember the distinction is that a rod
+bends like a switch, but a staff is stiff. I keep the well-known name
+'blade' for grass-leaves in their fresh green state.
+
+9. You felt, as you were bending down the paper into the form d, Fig. 21,
+the difficulty and awkwardness of the transition from the tubular form of
+the staff to the flat one of the flag. The mode in which this change is
+effected is one of the most interesting features in plants, for you will
+find presently that the leaf-stalk in ordinary leaves is only a means of
+accomplishing the same change from round to flat. But you know I said just
+now that some leaves were not flat, but set upright, edgeways. It is not a
+common position in two-leaved trees; but if you can run out and look at an
+arbor vitae, it may interest you {162} to see its hatchet-shaped vertically
+crested cluster of leaves transforming themselves gradually downwards into
+branches; and in one-leaved trees the vertically edged group is of great
+importance.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 23.]
+
+10. Cut out another piece of paper like a in Fig. 21, but now, instead of
+merely giving it nicks at a, b, cut it into the shape A, Fig. 23. Roll the
+lower part up as before, but instead of pulling the upper part down, pinch
+its back at the dotted line, and bring the two points, a and b, forward, so
+that they may touch each other. B shows the look of the thing half-done,
+before the points a and b have quite met. Pinch them close, and stitch the
+two edges neatly together, all the way from a to the point c; then roll and
+tie up the lower part as before. You will find then that the back or spinal
+line of the whole leaf is bent forward, as at B. Now go out to the garden
+and gather the green leaf of a fleur-de-lys, and look at it and your piece
+of disciplined paper together; and I fancy you will probably find out
+several things for yourself that I want you to know.
+
+11. You see, for one thing, at once, how _strong_ the fleur-de-lys leaf is,
+and that it is just twice as strong as a blade of grass, for it is the
+substance of the staff, with its sides flattened together, while the grass
+blade is a staff cut {163} open and flattened out. And you see that as a
+grass blade necessarily flaps down, the fleur-de-lys leaf as necessarily
+curves up, owing to that inevitable bend in its back. And you see, with its
+keen edge, and long curve, and sharp point, how like a sword it is. The
+botanists would for once have given a really good and right name to the
+plants which have this kind of leaf, 'Ensatae,' from the Latin 'ensis,' a
+sword; if only sata had been properly formed from sis. We can't let the
+rude Latin stand, but you may remember that the fleur-de-lys, which is the
+flower of chivalry, has a sword for its leaf, and a lily for its heart.
+
+12. In case you cannot gather a fleur-de-lys leaf, I have drawn for you, in
+Plate VI., a cluster of such leaves, which are as pretty as any, and so
+small that, missing the points of a few, I can draw them of their actual
+size. You see the pretty alternate interlacing at the bottom, and if you
+can draw at all, and will try to outline their curves, you will find what
+subtle lines they are. I did not know this name for the strong-edged grass
+leaves when I wrote the pieces about shield and sword leaves in 'Modern
+Painters'; I wish I had chanced in those passages on some other similitude,
+but I can't alter them now, and my trustful pupils may avoid all confusion
+of thought by putting gladius for ensis, and translating it by the word
+'scymitar,' which is also more accurate in expressing the curvature blade.
+So we will call the ensatae, instead, 'gladiolae,' translating,
+'scymitar-grasses.' And having {164} now got at some clear idea of the
+distinction between outlaid and inlaid growth in the stem, the reader will
+find the elementary analysis of forms resulting from outlaid growth in
+'Modern Painters'; and I mean to republish it in the sequel of this book,
+but must go on to other matters here. The growth of the inlaid stem we will
+follow as far as we need, for English plants, in examining the glasses.
+
+FLORENCE, _11th September, 1874_.
+
+As I correct this chapter for press, I find it is too imperfect to be let
+go without a word or two more. In the first place, I have not enough, in
+distinguishing the nature of the living yearly shoot, with its cluster of
+fresh leafage, from that of the accumulated mass of perennial trees, taken
+notice of the similar power even of the annual shoot, to obtain some manner
+of immortality for itself, or at least of usefulness, _after_ death. A
+Tuscan woman stopped me on the path up to Fiesole last night, to beg me to
+buy her plaited straw. I wonder how long straw lasts, if one takes care of
+it? A Leghorn bonnet, (if now such things are,) carefully put away,--even
+properly taken care of when it is worn,--how long will it last, young
+ladies?
+
+I have just been reading the fifth chapter of II. Esdras, and am fain to
+say, with less discomfort than otherwise I might have felt, (the example
+being set me by the archangel Uriel,) "I am not sent to tell thee, for I do
+not know." How old is the oldest straw known? the oldest {165} linen? the
+oldest hemp? We have mummy wheat,--cloth of papyrus, which is a kind of
+straw. The paper reeds by the brooks, the flax-flower in the field, leave
+such imperishable frame behind them. And Ponte-della-Paglia, in Venice; and
+Straw Street, of Paris, remembered in Heaven,--there is no occasion to
+change their names, as one may have to change 'Waterloo Bridge,' or the
+'Rue de l'Imperatrice.' Poor Empress! Had she but known that her true
+dominion was in the straw streets of her fields; not in the stone streets
+of her cities!
+
+But think how wonderful this imperishableness of the stem of many plants
+is, even in their annual work: how much more in their perennial work! The
+noble stability between death and life, of a piece of perfect wood? It
+cannot grow, but will not decay; keeps record of its years of life, but
+surrenders them to become a constantly serviceable thing: which may be
+sailed in, on the sea, built with, on the land, carved by Donatello,
+painted on by Fra Angelico. And it is not the wood's fault, but the fault
+of Florence in not taking proper care of it, that the panel of Sandro
+Botticelli's loveliest picture has cracked, (not with heat, I believe, but
+blighting frost), a quarter of an inch wide through the Madonna's face.
+
+But what is this strange state of undecaying wood? What sort of latent life
+has it, which it only finally parts with when it rots?
+
+Nay, what is the law by which its natural life is measured? What makes a
+tree 'old'? One sees the {166} Spanish-chesnut trunks among the Apennines
+growing into caves, instead of logs. Vast hollows, confused among the
+recessed darknesses of the marble crags, surrounded by mere laths of living
+stem, each with its coronal of glorious green leaves. Why can't the tree go
+on, and on,--hollowing itself into a Fairy--no--a Dryad, Ring,--till it
+becomes a perfect Stonehenge of a tree? Truly, "I am not sent to tell thee,
+for I do not know."
+
+The worst of it is, however, that I don't know one thing which I ought very
+thoroughly to have known at least thirty years ago, namely, the true
+difference in the way of building the trunk in outlaid and inlaid wood. I
+have an idea that the stem of a palm-tree is only a heap of leaf-roots
+built up like a tower of bricks, year by year, and that the palm tree
+really grows on the top of it, like a bunch of fern; but I've no books
+here, and no time to read them if I had. If only I were a strong giant,
+instead of a thin old gentleman of fifty-five, how I should like to pull up
+one of those little palm-trees by the roots--(by the way, what are the
+roots of a palm like? and, how does it stand in sand, where it is wanted to
+stand, mostly? Fancy, not knowing that, at fifty-five!)--that grow all
+along the Riviera; and snap its stem in two, and cut it down the middle.
+But I suppose there are sections enough now in our grand botanical
+collections, and you can find it all out for yourself. That you should be
+able to ask a question clearly, is two-thirds of the way to getting it
+answered; and I think this chapter of mine will at {167} least enable you
+to ask some questions about the stem, though what a stem is, truly, "I am
+not sent to tell thee, for I do not know."
+
+KNARESBOROUGH, _30th April, 1876_.
+
+I see by the date of last paragraph that this chapter has been in my good
+Aylesbury printer's type for more than a year and a half. At this rate,
+Proserpina has a distant chance of being finished in the spirit-land, with
+more accurate information derived from the archangel Uriel himself, (not
+that he is likely to know much about the matter, if he keeps on letting
+himself be prevented from ever seeing foliage in spring-time by the black
+demon-winds,) about the year 2000. In the meantime, feeling that perhaps I
+_am_ sent to tell my readers a little more than is above told, I have had
+recourse to my botanical friend, good Mr. Oliver of Kew, who has taught me,
+first, of palms, that they actually stitch themselves into the ground, with
+a long dipping loop, up and down, of the root fibres, concerning which
+sempstress-work I shall have a month's puzzlement before I can report on
+it; secondly, that all the increment of tree stem is, by division and
+multiplication of the cells of the wood, a process not in the least to be
+described as 'sending down roots from the leaf to the ground.' I suspected
+as much in beginning to revise this chapter; but hold to my judgment in not
+cancelling it. For this multiplication of the cells is at least compelled
+by an influence which passes from the leaf to the ground, and vice versa;
+and which is at present best {168} conceivable to me by imagining the
+continual and invisible descent of lightning from electric cloud by a
+conducting rod, endowed with the power of softly splitting the rod into two
+rods, each as thick as the original one. Studying microscopically, we
+should then see the molecules of copper, as we see the cells of the wood,
+dividing and increasing, each one of them into two. But the visible result,
+and mechanical conditions of growth, would still be the same as if the leaf
+actually sent down a new root fibre; and, more than this, the currents of
+accumulating substance, marked by the grain of the wood, are, I think,
+quite plainly and absolutely those of streams flowing only from the leaves
+downwards; never from the root up, nor of mere lateral increase. I must
+look over all my drawings again, and at tree stems again, with more
+separate study of the bark and pith in those museum sections, before I can
+assert this; but there will be no real difficulty in the investigation. If
+the increase of the wood is lateral only, the currents round the knots will
+be compressed at the sides, and open above and below; but if downwards,
+compressed above the knot and open below it. The nature of the force
+itself, and the manner of its ordinances in direction, remain, and must for
+ever remain, inscrutable as our own passions, in the hand of the God of all
+Spirits, and of all Flesh.
+
+     "Drunk is each ridge, of thy cup drinking,
+      Each clod relenteth at thy dressing,
+  {169}
+      Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking,
+      Fair spring sproutes forth, blest with thy blessing;
+  The fertile year is with thy bounty crouned,
+  And where thou go'st, thy goings fat the ground.
+
+      Plenty bedews the desert places,
+      A hedge of mirth the hills encloseth.
+      The fields with flockes have hid their faces,
+      A robe of corn the valleys clotheth.
+  Deserts and hills and fields and valleys all,
+  Rejoice, shout, sing, and on thy name do call."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{170}
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE BARK.
+
+1. Philologists are continually collecting instances, like our friend the
+French critic of Virgil, of the beauty of finished language, or the origin
+of unfinished, in the imitation of natural sounds. But such collections
+give an entirely false idea of the real power of language, unless they are
+balanced by an opponent list of the words which signally fail of any such
+imitative virtue, and whose sound, if one dwelt upon it, is destructive of
+their meaning.
+
+2. For instance. Few sounds are more distinct in their kind, or one would
+think more likely to be vocally reproduced in the word which signified
+them, than that of a swift rent in strongly woven cloth; and the English
+word 'rag' and ragged, with the Greek [Greek: rhegnumi], do indeed in a
+measure recall the tormenting effect upon the ear. But it is curious that
+the verb which is meant to express the actual origination of rags, should
+rhyme with two words entirely musical and peaceful--words, indeed, which I
+always reserve for final resource in passages which I want to be soothing
+as well as pretty,--'fair,' and {171} 'air;' while, in its orthography, it
+is identical with the word representing the bodily sign of tenderest
+passion, and grouped with a multitude of others,[44] in which the mere
+insertion of a consonant makes such wide difference of sentiment as between
+'dear' and 'drear,' or 'pear' and 'spear.' The Greek root, on the other
+hand, has persisted in retaining some vestige of its excellent dissonance,
+even where it has parted with the last vestige of the idea it was meant to
+convey; and when Burns did his best,--and his best was above most men's--to
+gather pleasant liquid and labial syllabling, round gentle meaning, in
+
+ "Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
+  Will ye go, will ye go,
+  Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
+  To the birks of Aberfeldy?"
+
+he certainly had little thought that the delicately crisp final k, in birk,
+was the remnant of a magnificent Greek effort to express the rending of the
+earth by earthquake, in the wars of the giants. In the middle of that word
+'esmarag[=e]se,' we get our own beggar's 'rag' for a pure root, which
+afterwards, through the Latin frango, softens into our 'break,' and
+'bark,'--the 'broken thing'; that idea of its rending around the tree's
+stem having been, in the very earliest human efforts at botanical
+description, {172} attached to it by the pure Aryan race, watching the
+strips of rosy satin break from the birch stems, in the Aberfeldys of
+Imaus.
+
+3. That this tree should have been the only one which "the Aryans, coming
+as conquerors from the North, were able to recognize in Hindustan,"[45] and
+should therefore also be "the only one whose name is common to Sanskrit,
+and to the languages of Europe," delighted me greatly, for two reasons: the
+first, for its proof that in spite of the development of species, the sweet
+gleaming of birch stem has never changed its argent and sable for any
+unchequered heraldry; and the second, that it gave proof of a much more
+important fact, the keenly accurate observation of Aryan foresters at that
+early date; for the fact is that the breaking of the thin-beaten silver of
+the birch trunk is so delicate, and its smoothness so graceful, that until
+I painted it with care, I was not altogether clear-headed myself about the
+way in which the chequering was done: nor until Fors today brought me to
+the house of one of my father's friends at Carshalton, and gave me three
+birch stems to look at just outside the window, did I perceive it to be a
+primal question about them, what it is that blanches that dainty dress of
+theirs, or, anticipatorily, weaves. What difference is there between the
+making of the corky excrescence of other {173} trees, and of this almost
+transparent fine white linen? I perceive that the older it is, within
+limits, the finer and whiter; hoary tissue, instead of hoary
+hair--honouring the tree's aged body; the outer sprays have no silvery
+light on their youth. Does the membrane thin itself into whiteness merely
+by stretching, or produce an outer film of new substance?[46]
+
+4. And secondly, this investiture, why is it transverse to the
+trunk,--swathing it, as it were, in bands? Above all,--when it breaks,--why
+does it break round the tree instead of down? All other bark breaks as
+anything would, naturally, round a swelling rod, but this, as if the stem
+were growing longer; until, indeed, it reaches farthest heroic old age,
+when the whiteness passes away again, and the rending is like that of other
+trees, downwards. So that, as it were in a changing language, we have the
+great botanical fact twice taught us, by this tree of Eden, that the skins
+of trees differ from the skins of the higher animals in that, for the most
+part, they won't stretch, and must be worn torn.
+
+So that in fact the most popular arrangement of vegetative adult costume is
+Irish; a normal investiture in honourable rags; and decorousness of
+tattering, as of a banner borne in splendid ruin through storms of war.
+
+5. Now therefore, if we think of it, we have five {174} distinct orders of
+investiture for organic creatures; first, mere secretion of mineral
+substance, chiefly lime, into a hard shell, which, if broken, can only be
+mended, like china--by sticking it together; secondly, organic substance of
+armour which grows into its proper shape at once for good and all, and
+can't be mended at all, if broken, (as of insects); thirdly, organic
+substance of skin, which stretches, as the creatures grows, by cracking,
+over a fresh skin which is supplied beneath it, as in bark of trees;
+fourthly, organic substance of skin cracked symmetrically into plates or
+scales which can increase all round their edges, and are connected by
+softer skin, below, as in fish and reptiles, (divided with exquisite lustre
+and flexibility, in feathers of birds); and lastly, true elastic skin,
+extended in soft unison with the creature's growth,--blushing with its
+blood, fading with its fear; breathing with its breath, and guarding its
+life with sentinel beneficence of pain.
+
+6. It is notable, in this higher and lower range of organic beauty, that
+the decoration, by pattern and colour, which is almost universal in the
+protective coverings of the middle ranks of animals, should be reserved in
+vegetables for the most living part of them, the flower only; and that
+among animals, few but the malignant and senseless are permitted, in the
+corrugation of their armour, to resemble the half-dead trunk of the tree,
+as they float beside it in the tropical river. I must, however, leave the
+scale patterns of the palms and other inlaid tropical {175} stems for
+after-examination,--content, at present, with the general idea of the bark
+of an outlaid tree as the successive accumulation of the annual protecting
+film, rent into ravines of slowly increasing depth, and coloured, like the
+rock, whose stability it begins to emulate, with the grey or gold of
+clinging lichen and embroidering moss.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{176}
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+GENEALOGY.
+
+1. Returning, after more than a year's sorrowful interval, to my Sicilian
+fields,--not incognisant, now, of some of the darker realms of Proserpina;
+and with feebler heart, and, it may be, feebler wits, for wandering in her
+brighter ones,--I find what I had written by way of sequel to the last
+chapter, somewhat difficult, and extremely tiresome. Not the less, after
+giving fair notice of the difficulty, and asking due pardon for the
+tiresomeness, I am minded to let it stand; trusting to end, with it, once
+for all, investigations of the kind. But in finishing this first volume of
+my School Botany, I must try to give the reader some notion of the plan of
+the book, as it now, during the time for thinking over it which illness
+left me, has got itself arranged in my mind, within limits of possible
+execution. And this the rather, because I wish also to state, somewhat more
+gravely than I have yet done, the grounds on which I venture here to reject
+many of the received names of plants; and to substitute others for them,
+relating to entirely different attributes {177} from those on which their
+present nomenclature is confusedly edified.
+
+I have already in some measure given the reasons for this change;[47] but I
+feel that, for the sake of those among my scholars who have laboriously
+learned the accepted names, I ought now also to explain its method more
+completely.
+
+2. I call the present system of nomenclature _confusedly_ edified, because
+it introduces,--without, apparently, any consciousness of the
+inconsistency, and certainly with no apology for it,--names founded
+sometimes on the history of plants, sometimes on their qualities, sometimes
+on their forms, sometimes on their products, and sometimes on their
+poetical associations.
+
+On their history--as 'Gentian' from King Gentius, and Funkia from Dr. Funk.
+
+On their qualities--as 'Scrophularia' from its (quite uncertified) use in
+scrofula.
+
+On their forms--as the 'Caryophylls' from having petals like husks of nuts.
+
+On their products--as 'Cocos nucifera' from its nuts.
+
+And on their poetical associations,--as the Star of Bethlehem from its
+imagined resemblance to the light of that seen by the Magi.
+
+3. Now, this variety of grounds for nomenclature might patiently, and even
+with advantage, be permitted, {178} provided the grounds themselves were
+separately firm, and the inconsistency of method advisedly allowed, and, in
+each case, justified. If the histories of King Gentius and Dr. Funk are
+indeed important branches of human knowledge;--if the Scrophulariaceae do
+indeed cure King's Evil;--if pinks be best described in their likeness to
+nuts;--and the Star of Bethlehem verily remind us of Christ's Nativity,--by
+all means let these and other such names be evermore retained. But if Dr.
+Funk be not a person in any special manner needing either stellification or
+florification; if neither herb nor flower can avail, more than the touch of
+monarchs, against hereditary pain; if it be no better account of a pink to
+say it is nut-leaved, than of a nut to say it is pink-leaved; and if the
+modern mind, incurious respecting the journeys of wise men, has already
+confused, in its Bradshaw's Bible, the station of Bethlehem with that of
+Bethel,[48] it is certainly time to take some order with the partly false,
+partly useless, and partly forgotten literature of the Fields; and, before
+we bow our children's memories to the burden of it, ensure that there shall
+be matter worth carriage in the load.
+
+4. And farther, in attempting such a change, we must be clear in our own
+minds whether we wish our nomenclature to tell us something about the plant
+itself, or only to tell us the place it holds in relation to other plants:
+as, for instance, in the Herb-Robert, would it be well to {179} christen
+it, shortly, 'Rob Roy,' because it is pre-eminently red, and so have done
+with it;--or rather to dwell on its family connections, and call it
+'Macgregoraceous'?
+
+5. Before we can wisely decide this point, we must resolve whether our
+botany is intended mainly to be useful to the vulgar, or satisfactory to
+the scientific elite. For if we give names characterizing individuals, the
+circle of plants which any country possesses may be easily made known to
+the children who live in it: but if we give names founded on the connexion
+between these and others at the Antipodes, the parish school-master will
+certainly have double work; and it may be doubted greatly whether the
+parish school-boy, at the end of the lecture, will have half as many ideas.
+
+6. Nevertheless, when the features of any great order of plants are
+constant, and, on the whole, represented with great clearness both in cold
+and warm climates, it may be desirable to express this their citizenship of
+the world in definite nomenclature. But my own method, so far as hitherto
+developed, consists essentially in fastening the thoughts of the pupil on
+the special character of the plant, in the place where he is likely to see
+it; and therefore, in expressing the power of its race and order in the
+wider world, rather by reference to mythological associations than to
+botanical structure.
+
+7. For instance, Plate VII. represents, of its real size, an ordinary
+spring flower in our English mountain fields. It is an average
+example,--not one of rare size under rare {180} conditions,--rather smaller
+than the average, indeed, that I might get it well into my plate. It is one
+of the flowers whose names I think good to change; but I look carefully
+through the existing titles belonging to it and its fellows, that I may
+keep all I expediently can. I find, in the first place, that Linnaeus called
+one group of its relations, Ophryds, from Ophrys,--Greek for the
+eyebrow,--on account of their resemblance to the brow of an animal
+frowning, or to the overshadowing casque of a helmet. I perceive this to be
+really a very general aspect of the flower; and therefore, no less than in
+respect to Linnaeus, I adopt this for the total name of the order, and call
+them 'Ophrydae,' or, shortly, 'Ophryds.'
+
+8. Secondly: so far as I know these flowers myself, I perceive them to fall
+practically into three divisions,--one, growing in English meadows and
+Alpine pastures, and always adding to their beauty; another, growing in all
+sorts of places, very ugly itself, and adding to the ugliness of its
+indiscriminated haunts; and a third, growing mostly up in the air, with as
+little root as possible, and of gracefully fantastic forms, such as this
+kind of nativity and habitation might presuppose. For the present, I am
+satisfied to give names to these three groups only. There may be plenty of
+others which I do not know, and which other people may name, according to
+their knowledge. But in all these three kinds known to me, I perceive one
+constant characteristic to be _some_ manner of _distortion_ and I desire
+that fact,--marking a {181} spiritual (in my sense of the word) character
+of extreme mystery,--to be the first enforced on the mind of the young
+learner. It is exhibited to the English child, primarily, in the form of
+the stalk of each flower, attaching it to the central virga. This stalk is
+always twisted once and a half round, as if somebody had been trying to
+wring the blossom off; and the name of the family, in Proserpina, will
+therefore be 'Contorta'[49] in Latin, and 'Wreathe-wort' in English.
+
+Farther: the beautiful power of the one I have drawn in its spring life, is
+in the opposition of its dark purple to the primrose in England, and the
+pale yellow anemone in the Alps. And its individual name will be,
+therefore, 'Contorta purpurea'--_Purple_ Wreathe-wort.
+
+And in drawing it, I take care to dwell on this strength of its color, and
+to show thoroughly that it is a _dark_ blossom,[50] before I trouble myself
+about its minor characters.
+
+9. The second group of this kind of flowers live, as I said, in all sorts
+of places; but mostly, I think, in disagreeable ones,--torn and irregular
+ground, under alternations of unwholesome heat and shade, and among swarms
+of nasty insects. I cannot yet venture on any bold general statement about
+them, but I think that is mostly their way; and at all events, they
+themselves are in the {182} habit of dressing in livid and unpleasant
+colors; and are distinguished from all other flowers by twisting, not only
+their stalks, but one of their petals, not once and a half only, but two or
+three times round, and putting it far out at the same time, as a foul
+jester would put out his tongue: while also the singular power of grotesque
+mimicry, which, though strong also in the other groups of their race, seems
+in the others more or less playful, is, in these, definitely degraded, and,
+in aspect, malicious.
+
+10. Now I find the Latin name 'Satyrium' attached already to one sort of
+these flowers; and we cannot possibly have a better one for all of them. It
+is true that, in its first Greek form, Dioscorides attaches it to a white,
+not a livid, flower; and I dare say there are some white ones of the breed:
+but, in its full sense, the term is exactly right for the entire group of
+ugly blossoms of which the characteristic is the spiral curve and
+protraction of their central petal: and every other form of Satyric
+ugliness which I find among the Ophryds, whatever its color, will be
+grouped with them. And I make them central, because this humour runs
+through the whole order, and is, indeed, their distinguishing sign.
+
+11. Then the third group, living actually in the air, and only holding fast
+by, without nourishing itself from, the ground, rock, or tree-trunk on
+which it is rooted, may of course most naturally and accurately be called
+'Aeria,' as it has long been popularly known in English by the name of
+Air-plant. {183}
+
+Thus we have one general name for all these creatures, 'Ophryd'; and three
+family or group names, Contorta, Satyrium, and Aeria,--every one of these
+titles containing as much accurate fact about the thing named as I can
+possibly get packed into their syllables: and I will trouble my young
+readers with no more divisions of the order. And if their parents, tutors,
+or governors, after this fair warning, choose to make them learn, instead,
+the seventy-seven different names with which botanist-heraldries have
+beautifully ennobled the family,--all I can say is, let them at least begin
+by learning them themselves. They will be found in due order in pages 1084,
+1085 of Loudon's Cyclopaedia.[51]
+
+12. But now, farther: the student will observe that the name of the total
+order is Greek; while the three family ones are Latin, although the central
+one is originally Greek also.
+
+I adopt this as far as possible for a law through my whole plant
+nomenclature.
+
+13. Farther: the terminations of the Latin family names will be, for the
+most part, of the masculine, {184} feminine, and neuter forms, us, a, um,
+with these following attached conditions.
+
+(I.) Those terminating in 'us,' though often of feminine words, as the
+central Arbor, will indicate either real masculine strength (quereus,
+laurus), or conditions of dominant majesty (cedrus), of stubbornness and
+enduring force (crataegus), or of peasant-like commonalty and hardship
+(juncus); softened, as it may sometimes happen, into gentleness and
+beneficence (thymus). The occasional forms in 'er' and 'il' will have
+similar power (acer, basil).
+
+(II.) Names with the feminine termination 'a,' if they are real names of
+girls, will always mean flowers that are perfectly pretty and perfectly
+good (Lucia, Viola, Margarita, Clarissa). Names terminating in 'a' which
+are not also accepted names of girls, may sometimes be none the less
+honourable, (Primula, Campanula,) but for the most part will signify either
+plants that are only good and worthy in a nursy sort of way, (Salvia,) or
+that are good without being pretty, (Lavandula,) or pretty without being
+good, (Kalmia). But no name terminating in 'a' will be attached to a plant
+that is neither good nor pretty.
+
+(III.) The neuter names terminating in 'um' will always indicate some power
+either of active or suggestive evil, (Conium, Solanum, Satyrium,) or a
+relation, more or less definite, to death; but this relation to death may
+sometimes be noble, or pathetic,--"which {185} to-day is, and to-morrow is
+cast into the oven,"--Lilium.
+
+But the leading position of these neuters in the plant's double name must
+be noticed by students unacquainted with Latin, in order to distinguish
+them from plural genitives, which will always, of course, be the second
+word, (Francesca Fontium, Francesca of the Springs.)
+
+14. Names terminating in 'is' and 'e,' if definitely names of women, (Iris,
+Amaryllis, Alcestis, Daphne,) will always signify flowers of great beauty,
+and noble historic association. If not definitely names of women, they will
+yet indicate some specialty of sensitiveness, or association with legend
+(Berberis, Clematis). No neuters in 'e' will be admitted.
+
+15. Participial terminations (Impatiens), with neuters in 'en' (Cyclamen),
+will always be descriptive of some special quality or form,--leaving it
+indeterminate if good or bad, until explained. It will be manifestly
+impossible to limit either these neuters, or the feminines in 'is' to Latin
+forms; but we shall always know by their termination that they cannot be
+generic names, if we are strict in forming these last on a given method.
+
+16. How little method there is in our present formation of them, I am
+myself more and more surprised as I consider. A child is shown a rose, and
+told that he is to call every flower like that, 'Rosaceous';[52] he is next
+{186} shown a lily, and told that he is to call every flower like that,
+'Liliaceous';--so far well; but he is next shown a daisy, and is not at all
+allowed to call every flower like that, 'Daisaceous,' but he must call it,
+like the fifth order of architecture, 'Composite'; and being next shown a
+pink, he is not allowed to call other pinks 'Pinkaceous,' but 'Nut-leafed';
+and being next shown a pease-blossom, he is not allowed to call other
+pease-blossoms 'Peasaceous,' but, in a brilliant burst of botanical
+imagination, he is incited to call it by two names instead of one,
+'Butterfly-aceous' from its flower, and 'Pod-aceous' from its seed;--the
+inconsistency of the terms thus enforced upon him being perfected in their
+inaccuracy, for a daisy is not one whit more composite than Queen of the
+meadow, or Jura Jacinth;[53] and 'legumen' is not Latin for a pod, but
+'siliqua,'--so that no good scholar could remember Virgil's 'siliqua
+quassante legumen,' without overthrowing all his Pisan nomenclature.
+
+17. Farther. If we ground our names of the higher orders on the distinctive
+characters of _form_ in plants, these are so many, and so subtle, that we
+are at once involved in more investigations than a young learner has ever
+time to follow successfully, and they must be at all times liable to
+dislocations and rearrangements on the discovery of any new link in the
+infinitely entangled {187} chain. But if we found our higher nomenclature
+at once on historic fact, and relative conditions of climate and character,
+rather than of form, we may at once distribute our flora into unalterable
+groups, to which we may add at our pleasure, but which will never need
+disturbance; far less, reconstruction.
+
+18. For instance,--and to begin,--it is an historical fact that for many
+centuries the English nation believed that the Founder of its religion,
+spiritually, by the mouth of the King who spake of all herbs, had likened
+himself to two flowers,--the Rose of Sharon, and Lily of the Valley. The
+fact of this belief is one of the most important in the history of
+England,--that is to say, of the mind or heart of England: and it is
+connected solemnly with the heart of Italy also, by the closing cantos of
+the Paradiso.
+
+I think it well therefore that our two first generic, or at least
+commandant, names heading the out-laid and in-laid divisions of plants,
+should be of the rose and lily, with such meaning in them as may remind us
+of this fact in the history of human mind.
+
+It is also historical that the personal appearing of this Master of our
+religion was spoken of by our chief religious teacher in these terms: "The
+Grace of God, that bringeth salvation, hath appeared unto all men." And it
+is a constant fact that this 'grace' or 'favor' of God is spoken of as
+"giving us to eat of the Tree of Life."
+
+19. Now, comparing the botanical facts I have to express, with these
+historical ones, I find that the rose tribe {188} has been formed among
+flowers, not in distant and monstrous geologic aeras, but in the human
+epoch;--that its 'grace' or favor has been in all countries so felt as to
+cause its acceptance everywhere for the most perfect physical type of
+womanhood;--and that the characteristic fruit of the tribe is so sweet,
+that it has become symbolic at once of the subtlest temptation, and the
+kindest ministry to the earthly passion of the human race. "Comfort me with
+apples, for I am sick of love."
+
+20. Therefore I shall call the entire order of these flowers 'Charites,'
+(Graces,) and they will be divided into these five genera, Rosa, Persica,
+Pomum, Rubra, and Fragaria. Which sequence of names I do not think the
+young learner will have difficulty in remembering; nor in understanding why
+I distinguish the central group by the fruit instead of the flower. And if
+he once clearly master the structure and relations of these five genera, he
+will have no difficulty in attaching to them, in a satellitic or
+subordinate manner, such inferior groups as that of the Silver-weed, or the
+Tormentilla; but all he will have to learn by heart and rote, will be these
+six names; the Greek Master-name, Charites, and the five generic names, in
+each case belonging to plants, as he will soon find, of extreme personal
+interest to him.
+
+21. I have used the word 'Order' as the name of our widest groups, in
+preference to 'Class,' because these widest groups will not always include
+flowers like each other in form, or equal to each other in vegetative rank;
+{189} but they will be 'Orders,' literally like those of any religious or
+chivalric association, having some common link rather intellectual than
+national,--the Charites, for instance, linked by their kindness,--the
+Oreiades, by their mountain seclusion, as Sisters of Charity or Monks of
+the Chartreuse, irrespective of ties of relationship. Then beneath these
+orders will come, what may be rightly called, either as above in Greek
+derivation, 'Genera,' or in Latin, 'Gentes,' for which, however, I choose
+the Latin word, because Genus is disagreeably liable to be confused on the
+ear with 'genius'; but Gens, never; and also 'nomen gentile' is a clearer
+and better expression than 'nomen generosum,' and I will not coin the
+barbarous one, 'genericum.' The name of the Gens, (as 'Lucia,') with an
+attached epithet, as 'Verna,' will, in most cases, be enough to
+characterize the individual flower; but if farther subdivision be
+necessary, the third order will be that of Families, indicated by a 'nomen
+familiare' added in the third place of nomenclature, as Lucia
+Verna,--Borealis; and no farther subdivision will ever be admitted. I avoid
+the word 'species'--originally a bad one, and lately vulgarized beyond
+endurance--altogether. And varieties belonging to narrow localities, or
+induced by horticulture, may be named as they please by the people living
+near the spot, or by the gardener who grows them; but will not be
+acknowledged by Proserpina. Nevertheless, the arbitrary reduction under
+Ordines, Gentes, and Familiae, {190} is always to be remembered as one of
+massive practical convenience only; and the more subtle arborescence of the
+infinitely varying structures may be followed, like a human genealogy, as
+far as we please, afterwards; when once we have got our common plants
+clearly arranged and intelligibly named.
+
+22. But now we find ourselves in the presence of a new difficulty, the
+greatest we have to deal with in the whole matter.
+
+One new nomenclature, to be thoroughly good, must be acceptable to scholars
+in the five great languages, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English;
+and it must be acceptable by them in teaching the native children of each
+country. I shall not be satisfied, unless I can feel that the little maids
+who gather their first violets under the Acropolis rock, may receive for
+them AEschylean words again with joy. I shall not be content, unless the
+mothers watching their children at play in the Ceramicus of Paris, under
+the scarred ruins of her Kings' palace, may yet teach them there to know
+the flowers which the Maid of Orleans gathered at Domremy. I shall not be
+satisfied unless every word I ask from the lips of the children of Florence
+and Rome, may enable them better to praise the flowers that are chosen by
+the hand of Matilda,[54] and bloom around the tomb of Virgil.
+
+{191}
+
+23. Now in this first example of nomenclature, the Master-name, being
+_pure_ Greek, may easily be accepted by Greek children, remembering that
+certain also of their own poets, if they did not call the flower a Grace
+itself, at least thought of it as giving gladness to the Three in their
+dances.[55] But for French children the word 'Grace' has been doubly and
+trebly corrupted; first, by entirely false theological scholarship,
+mistaking the 'Favor' or Grace done by God to good men, for the
+'Misericordia,' or mercy, shown by Him to bad ones; and so, in practical
+life, finally substituting 'Grace' as a word of extreme and mortal prayer,
+for 'Merci,' and of late using 'Merci' in a totally ridiculous and
+perverted power, for the giving of thanks (or refusal of offered good):
+while the literally derived word 'Charite' has become, in the modern mind,
+a gift, whether from God or man, only to the wretched, never to the happy:
+and lastly, 'Grace' in its physical sense has been perverted, by their
+social vulgarity, into an idea, whether with respect to form or motion,
+commending itself rather to the ballet-master than either to the painter or
+the priest.
+
+For these reasons, the Master name of this family, for my French pupils,
+must be simply 'Rhodiades,' which will bring, for them, the entire group of
+names into easily remembered symmetry; and the English form of {192} the
+same name, Rhodiad, is to be used by English scholars also for all tribes
+of this group except the five principal ones.
+
+24. Farther, in every gens of plants, one will be chosen as the
+representative, which, if any, will be that examined and described in the
+course of this work, if I have opportunity of doing so.
+
+This representative flower will always be a wild one, and of the simplest
+form which completely expresses the character of the plant; existing
+divinely and unchangeably from age to age, ungrieved by man's neglect, and
+inflexible by his power.
+
+And this divine character will be expressed by the epithet 'Sacred,' taking
+the sense in which we attach it to a dominant and christened majesty, when
+it belongs to the central type of any forceful order;--'Quercus sacra,'
+'Laurus sacra,' etc.,--the word 'Benedicta,' or 'Benedictus,' being used
+instead, if the plant be too humble to bear, without some discrepancy and
+unbecomingness, the higher title; as 'Carduus Benedictus,' Holy Thistle.
+
+25. Among the gentes of flowers bearing girls' names, the dominant one will
+be simply called the Queen, 'Rose Regina,' 'Rose the Queen' (the English
+wild rose); 'Clarissa Regina,' 'Clarissa the Queen' (Mountain Pink); 'Lucia
+Regina,' 'Lucy the Queen' (Spring Gentian), or in simpler English, 'Lucy of
+Teesdale,' as 'Harry of Monmouth.' The ruling flowers of groups {193} which
+bear names not yet accepted for names of girls, will be called simply
+'Domina,' or shortly 'Donna.' 'Rubra domina' (wild raspberry): the wild
+strawberry, because of her use in heraldry, will bear a name of her own,
+exceptional, 'Cora coronalis.'
+
+26. These main points being understood, and concessions made, we may first
+arrange the greater orders of land plants in a group of twelve, easily
+remembered, and with very little forcing. There must be _some_ forcing
+always to get things into quite easily tenable form, for Nature always has
+her ins and outs. But it is curious how fitly and frequently the number of
+twelve may be used for memoria technica; and in this instance the Greek
+derivative names fall at once into harmony with the most beautiful parts of
+Greek mythology, leading on to early Christian tradition.
+
+27. Their series will be, therefore, as follows: the principal subordinate
+groups being at once placed under each of the great ones. The reasons for
+occasional appearance of inconsistency will be afterwards explained, and
+the English and French forms given in each case are the terms which would
+be used in answering the rapid question, 'Of what order is this flower?'
+the answer being, It is a 'Cyllenid,' a 'Pleiad,' or a 'Vestal,' as one
+would answer of a person, he is a Knight of St. John or Monk of St.
+Benedict; while to the question, of what gens, we answer, a Stella or an
+Erica, as one would answer of a person, a Stuart or Plantagenet. {194}
+
+  I. CHARITES.
+  ENG. CHARIS. FR. RHODIADE.
+  Rosa. Persica. Pomum. Rubra. Fragaria.
+
+  II. URANIDES.
+  ENG. URANID. FR. URANIDE.
+  Lucia. Campanula. Convoluta.
+
+  III. CYLLENIDES.
+  ENG. CYLLENID. FR. NEPHELIDE.
+  Stella. Francesca. Primula.
+
+  IV. OREIADES.
+  ENG. OREIAD. FR. OREADE.
+  Erica. Myrtilla. Aurora.
+
+  V. PLEIADES.
+  ENG. PLEIAD. FR. PLEIADE.
+  Silvia. Anemone.
+
+  VI. ARTEMIDES.
+  ENG. ARTEMID. FR. ARTEMIDE.
+  Clarissa. Lychnis. Scintilla. Mica.
+
+  VII. VESTALES.
+  ENG. VESTAL. FR. VESTALE.
+  Mentha. Melitta. Basil. Salvia. Lavandula. Thymus.
+
+  VIII. CYTHERIDES.
+  ENG. CYTHERID. FR. CYTHERIDE.
+  Viola. Veronica. Giulietta.
+  {195}
+
+  IX. HELIADES.
+  ENG. ALCESTID. FR. HELIADE.
+  Clytia. Margarita. Alcestis. Falconia. Carduus.
+
+  X. DELPHIDES.
+  ENG. DELPHID. FR. DELPHIDE.
+  Laurus. Granata. Myrtus.
+
+  XI. HESPERIDES.
+  ENG. HESPERID. FR. HESPERIDE.
+  Aurantia. Aglee.
+
+  XII. ATHENAIDES.
+  ENG. ATHENAID. FR. ATHENAIDE.
+  Olea. Fraxinus.
+
+I will shortly note the changes of name in their twelve orders, and the
+reasons for them.
+
+I. CHARITES.--The only change made in the nomenclature of this order is the
+slight one of 'rubra' for 'rubus': partly to express true sisterhood with
+the other Charites; partly to enforce the idea of redness, as
+characteristic of the race, both in the lovely purple and russet of their
+winter leafage, and in the exquisite bloom of scarlet on the stems in
+strong young shoots. They have every right to be placed among the Charites,
+first because the raspberry is really a more important fruit in domestic
+economy than the strawberry; and, secondly, because the wild bramble is
+often in its wandering sprays even more graceful than the rose; and in
+blossom and {196} fruit the best autumnal gift that English Nature has
+appointed for her village children.
+
+II. URANIDES.--Not merely because they are all of the color of the sky, but
+also sacred to Urania in their divine purity. 'Convoluta' instead of
+'convolvulus,' chiefly for the sake of euphony; but also because pervinca
+is to be included in this group.
+
+III. CYLLENIDES.--Named from Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, because the three
+races included in the order alike delight in rocky ground, and in the cold
+or moist air of mountain-clouds.
+
+IV. OREIADES.--Described in next chapter.
+
+V. PLEIADES.--From the habit of the flowers belonging to this order to get
+into bright local clusters. Silvia, for the wood-sorrel, will I hope be an
+acceptable change to my girl-readers.
+
+VI. ARTEMIDES.--Dedicate to Artemis for their expression of energy, no less
+than purity. This character was rightly felt in them by whoever gave the
+name 'Dianthus' to their leading race; a name which I should have retained
+if it had not been bad Greek. I wish them, by their name 'Clarissa' to
+recall the memory of St. Clare, as 'Francesca' that of St. Francis.[56] The
+{197} 'issa,' not without honour to the greatest of our English moral
+story-tellers, is added for the practical reason, that I think the sound
+will fasten in the minds of children the essential characteristic of the
+race, the cutting of the outer edge of the petal as if with scissors.
+
+VII. VESTALES.--I allow this Latin form, because Hestiades would have been
+confused with Heliades. The order is named 'of the hearth,' from its
+manifold domestic use, and modest blossoming.
+
+VIII. CYTHERIDES.--Dedicate to Venus, but in all purity and peace of
+thought. Giulietta, for the coarse, and more than ordinarily false,
+Polygala.
+
+IX. HELIADES.--The sun-flowers.[57] In English, Alcestid, in honour to
+Chaucer and the Daisy.
+
+X. DELPHIDES.--Sacred to Apollo. Granata, changed from Punica, in honor to
+Granada and the Moors.
+
+XI. HESPERIDES.--Already a name given to the order. {198} Aegle, prettier
+and more classic than Limonia, includes the idea of brightness in the
+blossom.
+
+XII. ATHENAIDES.--I take Fraxinus into this group, because the mountain
+ash, in its hawthorn-scented flower, scarletest of berries, and exquisitely
+formed and finished leafage, belongs wholly to the floral decoration of our
+native rocks, and is associated with their human interests, though lightly,
+not less spiritually, than the olive with the mind of Greece.
+
+28. The remaining groups are in great part natural; but I separate for
+subsequent study five orders of supreme domestic utility, the Mallows,
+Currants, Pease,[58] Cresses, and Cranesbills, from those which, either in
+fruit or blossom, are for finer pleasure or higher beauty. I think it will
+be generally interesting for children to learn those five names as an easy
+lesson, and gradually discover, wondering, the world that they include. I
+will give their terminology at length, separately.
+
+29. One cannot, in all groups, have all the divisions of equal importance;
+the Mallows are only placed with the other four for their great value in
+decoration of cottage gardens in autumn: and their softly healing {199}
+qualities as a tribe. They will mentally connect the whole useful group
+with the three great AEsculapiadae, Cinchona, Coffea, and Camellia.
+
+30. Taking next the water-plants, crowned in the DROSIDAE, which include the
+five great families, Juncus, Jacinthus, Amaryllis, Iris, and Lilium, and
+are masculine in their Greek name because their two first groups, Juncus
+and Jacinthus, are masculine, I gather together the three orders of
+TRITONIDES, which are notably trefoil; the NAIADES, notably quatrefoil, but
+for which I keep their present pretty name; and the BATRACHIDES,[59]
+notably cinqfoil, for which I keep their present ugly one, only changing it
+from Latin into Greek.
+
+31. I am not sure of being forgiven so readily for putting the Grasses,
+Sedges, Mosses, and Lichens together, under the great general head of
+Demetridae. But it seems to me the mosses and lichens belong no less
+definitely to Demeter, in being the first gatherers of earth on rock, and
+the first coverers of its sterile surface, than the grass which at last
+prepares it to the foot and to the food of man. And with the mosses I shall
+take all the especially moss-plants which otherwise are homeless or
+companionless, Drosera, and the like, and as a connecting link with the
+flowers belonging to the Dark {200} Kora, the two strange orders of the
+Ophryds and Agarics.
+
+32. Lastly will come the orders of flowers which may be thought of as
+belonging for the most part to the Dark Kora of the lower world,--having at
+least the power of death, if not its terror, given them, together with
+offices of comfort and healing in sleep, or of strengthening, if not too
+prolonged, action on the nervous power of life. Of these, the first will be
+the DIONYSIDAE,--Hedera, Vitis, Liana; then the DRACONIDAE,--Atropa,
+Digitalis, Linaria; and, lastly, the MOIRIDAE,--Conium, Papaver, Solanum,
+Arum, and Nerium.
+
+33. As I see this scheme now drawn out, simple as it is, the scope of it
+seems not only far too great for adequate completion by my own labour, but
+larger than the time likely to be given to botany by average scholars would
+enable them intelligently to grasp: and yet it includes, I suppose, not the
+tenth part of the varieties of plants respecting which, in competitive
+examination, a student of physical science is now expected to know, or at
+least assert on hearsay, _something_.
+
+So far as I have influence with the young, myself, I would pray them to be
+assured that it is better to know the habits of one plant than the names of
+a thousand; and wiser to be happily familiar with those that grow in the
+nearest field, than arduously cognisant of all that plume the isles of the
+Pacific, or illumine the Mountains of the Moon. {201}
+
+Nevertheless, I believe that when once the general form of this system in
+Proserpina has been well learned, much other knowledge may be easily
+attached to it, or sheltered under the eaves of it: and in its own
+development, I believe everything may be included that the student will
+find useful, or may wisely desire to investigate, of properly European
+botany. But I am convinced that the best results of his study will be
+reached by a resolved adherence to extreme simplicity of primal idea, and
+primal nomenclature.
+
+34. I do not think the need of revisal of our present scientific
+classification could be more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that
+laurels and roses are confused, even by Dr. Lindley, in the mind of his
+feminine readers; the English word laurel, in the index to his first volume
+of Ladies' Botany, referring them to the cherries, under which the common
+laurel is placed as 'Prunus Laurocerasus,' while the true laurel, 'Laurus
+nobilis,' must be found in the index of the second volume, under the Latin
+form 'Laurus.'
+
+This accident, however, illustrates another, and a most important point to
+be remembered, in all arrangements whether of plants, minerals, or animals.
+No single classification can possibly be perfect, or anything _like_
+perfect. It must be, at its best, a ground, or _warp_ of arrangement only,
+through which, or over which, the cross threads of another,--yes, and of
+many others,--must be woven in our minds. Thus the almond, though in {202}
+the form and colour of its flower, and method of its fruit, rightly
+associated with the roses, yet by the richness and sweetness of its kernel
+must be held mentally connected with all plants that bear nuts. These
+assuredly must have something in their structure common, justifying their
+being gathered into a conceived or conceivable group of 'Nuciferae,' in
+which the almond, hazel, walnut, cocoa-nut, and such others would be
+considered as having relationship, at least in their power of secreting a
+crisp and sweet substance which is not wood, nor bark, nor pulp, nor
+seed-pabulum reducible to softness by boiling;--but quite separate
+substance, for which I do not know that there at present exists any
+botanical name,--of which, hitherto, I find no general account, and can
+only myself give so much, on reflection, as that it is crisp and close in
+texture, and always contains some kind of oil or milk.
+
+35. Again, suppose the arrangement of plants could, with respect to their
+flowers and fruits, be made approximately complete, they must instantly be
+broken and reformed by comparison of their stems and leaves. The three
+_creeping_ families of the Charites,--Rosa, Rubra, and Fragaria,--must then
+be frankly separated from the elastic Persica and knotty Pomum; of which
+one wild and lovely species, the hawthorn, is no less notable for the
+massive accumulation of wood in the stubborn stem of it, than the wild rose
+for her lovely power of wreathing her garlands at pleasure wherever they
+are {203} fairest, the stem following them and sustaining, where they will.
+
+36. Thus, as we examine successively each part of any plant, new
+sisterhoods, and unthought-of fellowships, will be found between the most
+distant orders; and ravines of unexpected separation open between those
+otherwise closely allied. Few botanical characters are more definite than
+the leaf structure illustrated in Plate VI., which has given to one group
+of the Drosidae the descriptive name of Ensatae, (see above, Chapter IX., Sec.
+11,) but this conformation would not be wisely permitted to interfere in
+the least with the arrangement founded on the much more decisive floral
+aspects of the Iris and Lily. So, in the fifth volume of 'Modern Painters,'
+the sword-like, or rather rapier-like, leaves of the pine are opposed, for
+the sake of more vivid realization, to the shield-like leaves of the
+greater number of inland trees; but it would be absurd to allow this
+difference any share in botanical arrangement,--else we should find
+ourselves thrown into sudden discomfiture by the wide-waving and opening
+foliage of the palms and ferns.
+
+37. But through all the defeats by which insolent endeavors to sum the
+orders of Creation must be reproved, and in the midst of the successes by
+which patient insight will be surprised, the fact of the _confirmation_ of
+species in plants and animals must remain always a miraculous one. What
+outstretched sign of constant Omnipotence can be more awful, than that the
+susceptibility to {204} external influences, with the reciprocal power of
+transformation, in the organs of the plant; and the infinite powers of
+moral training and mental conception over the nativity of animals, should
+be so restrained within impassable limits, and by inconceivable laws, that
+from generation to generation, under all the clouds and revolutions of
+heaven with its stars, and among all the calamities and convulsions of the
+Earth with her passions, the numbers and the names of her Kindred may still
+be counted for her in unfailing truth;--still the fifth sweet leaf unfold
+for the Rose, and the sixth spring for the Lily; and yet the wolf rave
+tameless round the folds of the pastoral mountains, and yet the tiger flame
+through the forests of the night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{205}
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+CORA AND KRONOS.
+
+1. Of all the lovely wild plants--and few, mountain-bred, in Britain, are
+other than lovely,--that fill the clefts and crest the ridges of my
+Brantwood rock, the dearest to me, by far, are the clusters of whortleberry
+which divide possession of the lower slopes with the wood hyacinth and
+pervenche. They are personally and specially dear to me for their
+association in my mind with the woods of Montanvert; but the plant itself,
+irrespective of all accidental feeling, is indeed so beautiful in all its
+ways--so delicately strong in the spring of its leafage, so modestly
+wonderful in the formation of its fruit, and so pure in choice of its
+haunts, not capriciously or unfamiliarly, but growing in luxuriance through
+all the healthiest and sweetest seclusion of mountain territory throughout
+Europe,--that I think I may without any sharp remonstrance be permitted to
+express for this once only, personal feeling in my nomenclature, calling it
+in Latin 'Myrtilla Cara,' and in French 'Myrtille Cherie,' but retaining
+for it in English its simply classic name, 'Blue Whortle.' {206}
+
+2. It is the most common representative of the group of Myrtillae, which, on
+reference to our classification, will be found central between the Ericae
+and Aurorae. The distinctions between these three families may be easily
+remembered, and had better be learned before going farther; but first let
+us note their fellowship. They are all Oreiades, mountain plants; in
+specialty, they are all strong in stem, low in stature, and the Ericae and
+Aurorae glorious in the flush of their infinitely exulting flowers, ("the
+rapture of the heath"--above spoken of, p. 96.) But all the essential
+loveliness of the Myrtillae is in their leaves and fruit: the first always
+exquisitely finished and grouped like the most precious decorative work of
+sacred painting; the second, red or purple, like beads of coral or
+amethyst. Their minute flowers have rarely any general part or power in the
+colors of mountain ground; but, examined closely, they are one of the chief
+joys of the traveller's rest among the Alps; and full of exquisiteness
+unspeakable, in their several bearings and miens of blossom, so to speak.
+Plate VIII. represents, however feebly, the proud bending back of her head
+by Myrtilla Regina:[60] an action as beautiful in _her_ as it is terrible
+in the Kingly Serpent of Egypt.
+
+3. The formal differences between these three families are trenchant and
+easily remembered. The Ericae {207} are all quatrefoils, and quatrefoils of
+the most studied and accomplished symmetry; and they bear no berries, but
+only dry seeds. The Myrtillae and Aurorae are both Cinqfoil; but the Myrtillae
+are symmetrical in their blossom, and the Aurorae unsymmetrical. Farther,
+the Myrtillae are not absolutely determinate in the number of their foils,
+(this being essentially a characteristic of flowers exposed to much
+hardship,) and are thus sometimes quatrefoil, in sympathy with the Ericae.
+But the Aurorae are strictly cinqfoil. These last are the only European form
+of a larger group, well named 'Azalea' from the Greek [Greek: aza],
+dryness, and its adjective [Greek: azalea], dry or parched; and _this_ name
+must be kept for the world-wide group, (including under it Rhododendron,
+but not Kalmia,) because there is an under-meaning in the word Aza,
+enabling it to be applied to the substance of dry earth, and indicating one
+of the great functions of the Oreiades, in common with the mosses,--the
+collection of earth upon rocks.
+
+4. Neither the Ericae, as I have just said, nor Aurorae bear useful fruit;
+and the Ericae are named from their consequent worthlessness in the eyes of
+the Greek farmer; they were the plants he 'tore up' for his bed, or
+signal-fire, his word for them including a farther sense of crushing or
+bruising into a heap. The Westmoreland shepherds now, alas! burn them
+remorselessly on the ground, (and a year since had nearly set the copse of
+Brantwood on fire just above the house.) The sense of {208} parched and
+fruitless existence is given to the heaths, with beautiful application of
+the context, in our English translation of Jeremiah xvii. 6; but I find the
+plant there named is, in the Septuagint, Wild Tamarisk; the mountains of
+Palestine being, I suppose, in that latitude, too low for heath, unless in
+the Lebanon.
+
+5. But I have drawn the reader's thoughts to this great race of the
+Oreiades at present, because they place for us in the clearest light a
+question which I have finally to answer before closing the first volume of
+Proserpina; namely, what is the real difference between the three ranks of
+Vegetative Humility, and Noblesse--the Herb, the Shrub, and the Tree?
+
+6. Between the herb, which perishes annually, and the plants which
+construct year after year an increasing stem, there is, of course, no
+difficulty of discernment; but between the plants which, like these
+Oreiades, construct for themselves richest intricacy of supporting stem,
+yet scarcely rise a fathom's height above the earth they gather and
+adorn,--between these, and the trees that lift cathedral aisles of colossal
+shade on Andes and Lebanon,--where is the limit of kind to be truly set?
+
+7. We have the three orders given, as no botanist could, in twelve lines by
+Milton:--
+
+ "Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flow'r'd
+  Op'ning their various colours, and made gay
+  Her bosom smelling sweet; and, these scarce blown,
+  Forth flourish'd thick the clust'ring vine, forth crept
+  {209}
+  The swelling gourd, up stood the corny reed
+  Embattel'd in her field; and th' _humble shrub,_
+  _And bush with frizzled hair implicit_: last
+  Rose, as in dance, the stately trees, and spread
+  Their branches hung with copious fruits, or gemm'd
+  Their blossoms; with high woods the hills were crown'd;
+  With tufts the valleys and each fountain side;
+  With borders long the rivers."
+
+Only to learn, and be made to understand, these twelve lines thoroughly
+would teach a youth more of true botany than an entire Cyclopaedia of modern
+nomenclature and description: they are, like all Milton's work, perfect in
+accuracy of epithet, while consummate in concentration. Exquisite in touch,
+as infinite in breadth, they gather into their unbroken clause of melodious
+compass the conception at once of the Columbian prairie, the English
+cornfield, the Syrian vineyard, and the Indian grove. But even Milton has
+left untold, and for the instant perhaps unthought of, the most solemn
+difference of rank between the low and lofty trees, not in magnitude only,
+nor in grace, but in duration.
+
+8. Yet let us pause before passing to this greater subject, to dwell more
+closely on what he has told us so clearly,--the difference in Grace,
+namely, between the trees that rise 'as in dance,' and 'the bush with
+frizzled hair.' For the bush form is essentially one taken by vegetation in
+some kind of distress; scorched by heat, discouraged by darkness, or bitten
+by frost; it is the form in which isolated knots of earnest plant life stay
+{210} the flux of fiery sands, bind the rents of tottering crags, purge the
+stagnant air of cave or chasm, and fringe with sudden hues of unhoped
+spring the Arctic edge of retreating desolation.
+
+On the other hand, the trees which, as in sacred dance, make the borders of
+the rivers glad with their procession, and the mountain ridges statelier
+with their pride, are all expressions of the vegetative power in its
+accomplished felicities; gathering themselves into graceful companionship
+with the fairest arts and serenest life of man; and providing not only the
+sustenance and the instruments, but also the lessons and the delights, of
+that life, in perfectness of order, and unblighted fruition of season and
+time.
+
+9. 'Interitura'--yet these not to-day, nor to-morrow, nor with the decline
+of the summer's sun. We describe a plant as small or great; and think we
+have given account enough of its nature and being. But the chief question
+for the plant, as for the human creature, is the Number of its days; for to
+the tree, as to its master, the words are forever true--"As thy Day is, so
+shall thy Strength be."
+
+10. I am astonished hourly, more and more, at the apathy and stupidity
+which have prevented me hitherto from learning the most simple facts at the
+base of this question! Here is this myrtille bush in my hand--its cluster
+of some fifteen or twenty delicate green branches knitting themselves
+downwards into the stubborn brown {211} of a stem on which my knife makes
+little impression. I have not the slightest idea how old it is, still less
+how old it might one day have been if I had not gathered it; and, less than
+the least, what hinders it from becoming as old as it likes! What doom is
+there over these bright green sprays, that they may never win to any height
+or space of verdure, nor persist beyond their narrow scope of years?
+
+11. And the more I think the more I bewilder myself; for these bushes,
+which are pruned and clipped by the deathless Gardener into these lowly
+thickets of bloom, do not strew the ground with fallen branches and faded
+clippings in any wise,--it is the pining umbrage of the patriarchal trees
+that tinges the ground and betrays the foot beneath them: but, under the
+heather and the Alpine rose.--Well, what _is_ under them, then? I never
+saw, nor thought of looking,--will look presently under my own bosquets and
+beds of lingering heather-blossom: beds indeed they were only a month
+since, a foot deep in flowers, and close in tufted cushions, and the
+mountain air that floated over them rich in honey like a draught of
+metheglin.
+
+12. Not clipped, nor pruned, I think, after all,--nor dwarfed in the
+gardener's sense; but pausing in perpetual youth and strength, ordained out
+of their lips of roseate infancy. Rose-trees--the botanists have falsely
+called the proudest of them; yet not trees in any wise, they, nor doomed to
+know the edge of axe at their {212} roots, nor the hoary waste of time, or
+searing thunderstroke, on sapless branches. Continual morning for them, and
+_in_ them; they themselves an Aurora, purple and cloudless, stayed on all
+the happy hills. That shall be our name for them, in the flushed Phoenician
+colour of their height, in calm or tempest of the heavenly sea; how much
+holier than the depth of the Tyrian! And the queen of them on our own Alps
+shall be 'Aurora Alpium.'[61]
+
+13. There is one word in the Miltonian painting of them which I must lean
+on specially; for the accurate English of it hides deep morality no less
+than botany. 'With hair _implicit_.' The interweaving of complex band,
+which knits the masses of heath or of Alpine rose into their dense tufts
+and spheres of flower, is to be noted both in these, and in stem structure
+of a higher order like that of the stone pine, for an expression of the
+instinct of the plant gathering itself into protective unity, whether
+against cold or heat, while the forms of the trees which have no hardship
+to sustain are uniformly based on the effort of each spray to _separate_
+itself from its fellows to the utmost, and obtain around its own leaves the
+utmost space of air.
+
+In vulgar modern English, the term 'implicit' used of Trust or Faith, has
+come to signify only its serenity. But the Miltonian word gives the
+_reason_ of serenity: {213} the root and branch intricacy of closest
+knowledge and fellowship.
+
+14. I have said that Milton has told us more in these few lines than any
+botanist could. I will prove my saying by placing in comparison with them
+two passages of description by the most imaginative and generally
+well-trained scientific man since Linnaeus--Humboldt--which, containing much
+that is at this moment of special use to us, are curious also in the
+confusion even of the two orders of annual and perennial plants, and show,
+therefore, the extreme need of most careful initial work in this
+distinction of the reign of Cora from that of Kronos.
+
+"The disk of the setting sun appeared like a globe of fire suspended over
+the savannah; and its last rays, as they swept the earth, illumined the
+extremities of the grass, strongly agitated by the evening breeze. In the
+low and humid places of the equinoxial zone, even when the gramineous
+plants and reeds present the aspect of a meadow, of turf, a rich decoration
+of the picture is usually wanting. I mean that variety of wild flowers
+which, scarcely rising above the grass, seem to lie upon a smooth bed of
+verdure. Between the tropics, the strength and luxury of vegetation give
+such a development to plants, that the smallest of the dicotyledonous
+family become shrubs.[62] It would seem as if the {214} liliaceous plants,
+mingled with the gramina, assumed the place of the flowers of our meadows.
+Their form is indeed striking; they dazzle by the variety and splendor of
+their colours; but, too high above the soil, they disturb that harmonious
+relation which exists among the plants that compose our meadows and our
+turf. Nature, in her beneficence, has given the landscape under every zone
+its peculiar type of beauty.
+
+"After proceeding four hours across the savannahs, we entered into a little
+wood composed of shrubs and small trees, which is called El Pejual; no
+doubt because of the great abundance of the 'Pejoa' (Gaultheria odorata,) a
+plant with very odoriferous leaves. The steepness of the mountain became
+less considerable, and we felt an indescribable pleasure in examining the
+plants of this region. Nowhere, perhaps, can be found collected together in
+so small a space of ground, productions so beautiful, and so remarkable in
+regard to the geography of plants. At the height of a thousand toises, the
+lofty savannahs of the hills terminate in a zone of shrubs, which by their
+appearance, their tortuous branches, their stiff leaves, and the dimensions
+and beauty of their purple flowers, remind us of what is called in the
+Cordilleras of the Andes the vegetation of the _paramos_[63] and the
+_punas_. We find there the {215} family of the Alpine rhododendrons, the
+thibaudias, the andromedas, the vacciniums, and those befarias[64] with
+resinous leaves, which we have several times compared to the rhododendron
+of our European Alps.
+
+"Even when nature does not produce the same species in analogous climates,
+either in the plains of isothermal parallels, or on table-lands the
+temperature of which resembles that of places nearer the poles, we still
+remark a striking resemblance of appearance and physiognomy in the
+vegetation of the most distant countries. This phenomenon is one of the
+most curious in the history of organic forms. I say the history; for in
+vain would reason forbid man to form hypotheses on the origin of things: he
+is not the less tormented with these insoluble problems of the distribution
+of beings."
+
+15. Insoluble--yes, assuredly, poor little beaten phantasms of palpitating
+clay that we are--and who asked us to solve it? Even this Humboldt,
+quiet-hearted and modest watcher of the ways of Heaven, in the real make of
+him, came at last to be so far puffed up by his vain science in declining
+years that he must needs write a Kosmos of things in the Universe,
+forsooth, as if he knew all about them! when he was not able meanwhile,
+(and does not seem even to have desired the ability,) to put the slightest
+Kosmos into his own 'Personal Narrative'; but leaves one to gather what one
+wants out of {216} its wild growth; or rather, to wash or winnow what may
+be useful out of its debris, without any vestige either of reference or
+index; and I must look for these fragmentary sketches of heath and grass
+through chapter after chapter about the races of the Indian and religion of
+the Spaniard,--these also of great intrinsic value, but made useless to the
+general reader by interspersed experiment on the drifts of the wind and the
+depths of the sea.
+
+16. But one more fragment out of a note (vol. iii., p. 494) I must give,
+with reference to an order of the Rhododendrons as yet wholly unknown to
+me.
+
+"The name of vine tree, 'uvas camaronas' (Shrimp grapes?) is given in the
+Andes to plants of the genus Thibaudia on account of their _large succulent
+fruit_. Thus the ancient botanists give the name of Bear's vine, 'Uva
+Ursi,' and vine of Mount Ida, 'Vitis Idea,' to an Arbutus and Myrtillus
+which belong, like the Thibaudiae, to the family of the Ericineae."
+
+Now, though I have one entire bookcase and half of another, and a large
+cabinet besides, or about fifteen feet square of books on botany beside me
+here, and a quantity more at Oxford, I have no means whatever, in all the
+heap, of finding out what a Thibaudia is like. Loudon's Cyclopaedia, the
+only general book I have, tells me only that it will grow well in camellia
+houses, that its flowers develope at Christmas, and that they are
+beautifully varied like a fritillary: whereupon I am very anxious to see
+them, and taste their fruit, and be able to {217} tell my pupils something
+intelligible of them,--a new order, as it seems to me, among my Oreiades.
+But for the present I can make no room for them, and must be content, for
+England and the Alps, with my single class, Myrtilla, including all the
+fruit-bearing and (more or less) myrtle-leaved kinds; and Azalea for the
+fruitless flushing of the loftier tribes; taking the special name 'Aurora'
+for the red and purple ones of Europe, and resigning the already accepted
+'Rhodora' to those of the Andes and Himalaya.
+
+17. Of which also, with help of earnest Indian botanists, I hope
+nevertheless to add some little history to that of our own Oreiades; but
+shall set myself on the most familiar of them first, as I partly hinted in
+taking for the frontispiece of this volume two unchecked shoots of our
+commonest heath, in their state of full lustre and decline. And now I must
+go out and see and think--and for the first time in my life--what becomes
+of all these fallen blossoms, and where my own mountain Cora hides herself
+in winter; and where her sweet body is laid in its death.
+
+Think of it with me, for a moment before I go. That harvest of amethyst
+bells, over all Scottish and Irish and Cumberland hill and moorland; what
+substance is there in it, yearly gathered out of the mountain
+winds,--stayed there, as if the morning and evening clouds had been caught
+out of them and woven into flowers; 'Ropes of sea-sand'--but that is
+child's magic {218} merely, compared to the weaving of the Heath out of the
+cloud. And once woven, how much of it is forever worn by the Earth? What
+weight of that transparent tissue, half crystal and half comb of honey,
+lies strewn every year dead under the snow?
+
+I must go and look, and can write no more to-day; nor to-morrow neither. I
+must gather slowly what I see, and remember; and meantime leaving, to be
+dealt with afterwards, the difficult and quite separate question of the
+production of _wood_, I will close this first volume of Proserpina with
+some necessary statements respecting the operations, serviceable to other
+creatures than themselves, in which the lives of the noblest plants are
+ended: honourable in this service equally, though evanescent, some,--in the
+passing of a breeze--or the dying of a day;--and patient some, of storm and
+time, serene in fruitful sanctity, through all the uncounted ages which Man
+has polluted with his tears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{219}
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE SEED AND HUSK.
+
+1. Not the least sorrowful, nor least absurd of the confusions brought on
+us by unscholarly botanists, blundering into foreign languages, when they
+do not know how to use their own, is that which has followed on their
+practice of calling the seed-vessels of flowers 'egg-vessels,'[65] in
+Latin; thus involving total loss of the power of the good old English word
+'husk,' and the good old French one, 'cosse.' For all the treasuries of
+plants (see Chapter IV., Sec. 17) may be best conceived, and described,
+generally, as consisting of 'seed' and 'husk,'--for the most part two or
+more seeds, in a husk composed of two or more parts, as pease in their
+shell, pips in an orange, or kernels in a walnut; but whatever their
+number, or the method of their enclosure, let the student keep clear in his
+mind, for the base of all study of fructification, the broad distinction
+between the seed, as one thing, and the husk as another: the seed,
+essential to the continuance of the plant's race; and the husk, {220}
+adapted, primarily, to its guard and dissemination; but secondarily, to
+quite other and far more important functions.
+
+2. For on this distinction follows another practical one of great
+importance. A seed may serve, and many do mightily serve, for the food of
+man, when boiled, crushed, or otherwise industriously prepared by man
+himself, for his mere _sustenance_. But the _husk_ of the seed is prepared
+in many cases for the delight of his eyes, and the pleasure of his palate,
+by Nature herself, and is then called a 'fruit.'
+
+3. The varieties of structure both in seed and husk, and yet more, the
+manner in which the one is contained, and distributed by, the other, are
+infinite; and in some cases the husk is apparently wanting, or takes some
+unrecognizable form. But in far the plurality of instances the two parts of
+the plant's treasury are easily distinguishable, and must be separately
+studied, whatever their apparent closeness of relation, or, (as in all
+natural things,) the equivocation sometimes taking place between the one
+and the other. To me, the especially curious point in this matter is that,
+while I find the most elaborate accounts given by botanists of the stages
+of growth in each of these parts of the treasury, they never say of what
+use the guardian is to the guarded part, irrespective of its service to
+man. The mechanical action of the husk in containing and scattering the
+seeds, they indeed often notice and insist on; but they do not tell {221}
+us of what, if any, nutritious or fostering use the rind is to a chestnut,
+or an orange's pulp to its pips, or a peach's juice to its stone.
+
+4. Putting aside this deeper question for the moment, let us make sure we
+understand well, and define safely, the separate parts themselves. A seed
+consists essentially of a store, or sack, containing substance to nourish a
+germ of life, which is surrounded by such substance, and in the process of
+growth is first fed by it. The germ of life itself rises into two portions,
+and not more than two, in the seeds of two-leaved plants; but this
+symmetrical dualism must not be allowed to confuse the student's
+conception, of the _three_ organically separate parts,--the tough skin of a
+bean, for instance; the softer contents of it which we boil to eat; and the
+small germ from which the root springs when it is sown. A bean is the best
+type of the whole structure. An almond out of its shell, a peach-kernel,
+and an apple-pip are also clear and perfect, though varied types.
+
+5. The husk, or seed-vessel, is seen in perfect simplicity of type in the
+pod of a bean, or the globe of a poppy. There are, I believe, flowers in
+which it is absent or imperfect; and when it contains only one seed, it may
+be so small and closely united with the seed it contains, that both will be
+naturally thought of as one thing only. Thus, in a dandelion, the little
+brown grains, which may be blown away, each with its silken parachute, are
+every one of them a complete husk and {222} seed together. But the majority
+of instances (and those of plants the most serviceable to man) in which the
+seed-vessel has entirely a separate structure and mechanical power, justify
+us in giving it the normal term 'husk,' as the most widely applicable and
+intelligible.
+
+6. The change of green, hard, and tasteless vegetable substance into
+beautifully coloured, soft, and delicious substance, which produces what we
+call a fruit, is, in most cases, of the husk only; in others, of the part
+of the stalk which immediately sustains the seed; and in a very few
+instances, not properly a change, but a distinct formation, of fruity
+substance between the husk and seed. Normally, however, the husk, like the
+seed, consists always of three parts; it has an outer skin, a central
+substance of peculiar nature, and an inner skin, which holds the seed. The
+main difficulty, in describing or thinking of the completely ripened
+product of any plant, is to discern clearly which is the inner skin of the
+husk, and which the outer skin of the seed. The peach is in this respect
+the best general type,--the woolly skin being the outer one of the husk;
+the part we eat, the central substance of the husk; and the hard shell of
+the stone, the inner skin of the husk. The bitter kernel within is the
+seed.
+
+7. In this case, and in the plum and cherry, the two parts under present
+examination--husk and seed--separate naturally; the fruity part, which is
+the body of the husk, adhering firmly to the shell, which is its inner
+{223} coat. But in the walnut and almond, the two outer parts of the husk
+separate from the interior one, which becomes an apparently independent
+'shell.' So that when first I approached this subject I divided the general
+structure of a treasury into _three_ parts--husk, shell, and kernel; and
+this division, when we once have mastered the main one, will be often
+useful. But at first let the student keep steadily to his conception of the
+two constant parts, husk and seed, reserving the idea of shells and kernels
+for one group of plants only.
+
+8. It will not be always without difficulty that he maintains the
+distinction, when the tree pretends to have changed it. Thus, in the
+chestnut, the inner coat of the husk becomes brown, adheres to the seed,
+and seems part of it; and we naturally call only the thick, green, prickly
+coat, the husk. But this is only one of the deceiving tricks of Nature, to
+compel our attention more closely. The real place of separation, to _her_
+mind, is between the mahogany-coloured shell and the nut itself, and that
+more or less silky and flossy coating within the brown shell is the true
+lining of the entire 'husk.' The paler brown skin, following the rugosities
+of the nut, is the true sack or skin of the seed. Similarly in the walnut
+and almond.
+
+9. But, in the apple, two new tricks are played us. First, in the brown
+skin of the ripe pip, we might imagine we saw the part correspondent to the
+mahogany skin of the chestnut, and therefore the inner coat of the {224}
+husk. But it is not so. The brown skin of the pips belongs to them
+properly, and is all their own. It is the true skin or sack of the seed.
+The inner coat of the husk is the smooth, white, scaly part of the core
+that holds them.
+
+Then,--for trick number two. We should as naturally imagine the skin of the
+apple, which we peel off, to be correspondent to the skin of the peach; and
+therefore, to be the outer part of the husk. But not at all. The outer part
+of the husk in the apple is melted away into the fruity mass of it, and the
+red skin outside is the skin of its _stalk_, not of its seed-vessel at all!
+
+10. I say 'of its stalk,'--that is to say, of the part of the stalk
+immediately sustaining the seed, commonly called the torus, and expanding
+into the calyx. In the apple, this torus incorporates itself with the husk
+completely; then refines its own external skin, and colours _that_
+variously and beautifully, like the true skin of the husk in the peach,
+while the withered leaves of the calyx remain in the 'eye' of the apple.
+
+But in the 'hip' of the rose, the incorporation with the husk of the seed
+does not take place. The torus, or,--as in this flower from its peculiar
+form it is called,--the tube of the calyx, alone forms the frutescent part
+of the hip; and the complete seeds, husk and all, (the firm triangular husk
+enclosing an almond-shaped kernel,) are grouped closely in its interior
+cavity, while the calyx remains on the top in a large and scarcely
+withering star. {225} In the nut, the calyx remains green and beautiful,
+forming what we call the husk of a filbert; and again we find Nature
+amusing herself by trying to make us think that this strict envelope,
+almost closing over the single seed, is the same thing to the nut that its
+green shell is to a walnut!
+
+11. With still more capricious masquing, she varies and hides the structure
+of her 'berries.'
+
+The strawberry is a hip turned inside-out, the frutescent receptacle
+changed into a scarlet ball, or cone, of crystalline and delicious coral,
+in the outside of which the separate seeds, husk and all, are imbedded. In
+the raspberry and blackberry, the interior mound remains sapless; and the
+rubied translucency of dulcet substance is formed round each separate seed,
+_upon_ its husk; not a part of the husk, but now an entirely independent
+and added portion of the plant's bodily form.
+
+12. What is thus done for each seed, on the _out_side of the receptacle, in
+the raspberry, is done for each seed, _in_side the calyx, in a pomegranate;
+which is a hip in which the seeds have become surrounded with a radiant
+juice, richer than claret wine; while the seed itself, within the generous
+jewel, is succulent also, and spoken of by Tournefort as a "baie
+succulente." The tube of the calyx, brown-russet like a large hip,
+externally, is yet otherwise divided, and separated wholly from the
+cinque-foiled, and cinque-celled rose, both in number of petal and division
+of treasuries; the calyx has eight points, and nine cells. {226}
+
+13. Lastly, in the orange, the fount of fragrant juice is interposed
+between the seed and the husk. It is wholly independent of both; the
+Aurantine rind, with its white lining and divided compartments, is the true
+husk; the orange pips are the true seeds; and the eatable part of the fruit
+is formed between them, in clusters of delicate little flasks, as if a
+fairy's store of scented wine had been laid up by her in the hollow of a
+chestnut shell, between the nut and rind; and then the green changed to
+gold.
+
+14. I have said '_lastly_'--of the orange, for fear of the reader's
+weariness only; not as having yet represented, far less exhausted, the
+variety of frutescent form. But these are the most important types of it;
+and before I can explain the relation between these, and another, too often
+confounded with them--the _granular_ form of the seed of grasses.--I must
+give some account of what, to man, is far more important than the form--the
+gift to him in fruit-food; and trial, in fruit-temptation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{227}
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE FRUIT GIFT.
+
+1. In the course of the preceding chapter, I hope that the reader has
+obtained, or may by a little patience both obtain and secure, the idea of a
+great natural Ordinance, which, in the protection given to the part of
+plants necessary to prolong their race, provides, for happier living
+creatures, food delightful to their taste, and forms either amusing or
+beautiful to their eyes. Whether in receptacle, calyx, or true husk,--in
+the cup of the acorn, the fringe of the filbert, the down of the apricot,
+or bloom of the plum, the powers of Nature consult quite other ends than
+the mere continuance of oaks and plum trees on the earth; and must be
+regarded always with gratitude more deep than wonder, when they are indeed
+seen with human eyes and human intellect.
+
+2. But in one family of plants, the _contents_ also of the seed, not the
+envelope of it merely, are prepared for the support of the higher animal
+life; and their grain, filled with the substance which, for universally
+understood name, may best keep the Latin one of Farina,--becoming in
+French, 'Farine,' and in English, 'Flour,'--both in the perfectly
+nourishing elements of it, and its {228} easy and abundant
+multiplicability, becomes the primal treasure of human economy.
+
+3. It has been the practice of botanists of all nations to consider the
+seeds of the grasses together with those of roses and pease, as if all
+could be described on the same principles, and with the same nomenclature
+of parts. But the grain of corn is a quite distinct thing from the seed of
+pease. In _it_, the husk and the seed envelope have become inextricably
+one. All the exocarps, endocarps, epicarps, mesocarps, shells, husks,
+sacks, and skins, are woven at once together into the brown bran; and
+inside of that, a new substance is collected for us, which is not what we
+boil in pease, or poach in eggs, or munch in nuts, or grind in coffee;--but
+a thing which, mixed with water and then baked, has given to all the
+nations of the world their prime word for food, in thought and
+prayer,--Bread; their prime conception of the man's and woman's labor in
+preparing it--("whoso putteth hand to the _plough_"--two women shall be
+grinding at the _mill_)--their prime notion of the means of cooking by
+fire--("which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the _oven_"), and their
+prime notion of culinary office--the "chief _baker_," cook, or
+pastrycook,--(compare Bedreddin Hassan in the Arabian Nights): and,
+finally, to modern civilization, the Saxon word 'lady,' with whatever it
+imports.
+
+4. It has also been the practice of botanists to confuse all the ripened
+products of plants under the general term {229} 'fruit.' But the essential
+and separate fruit-gift is of two substances, quite distinct from flour,
+namely, oil and wine, under the last term including for the moment all
+kinds of juice which will produce alcohol by fermentation. Of these, oil
+may be produced either in the kernels of nuts, as in almonds, or in the
+substance of berries, as in the olive, date, and coffee-berry. But the
+sweet juice which will become medicinal in wine, can only be developed in
+the husk, or in the receptacle.
+
+5. The office of the Chief Butler, as opposed to that of the Chief Baker,
+and the office of the Good Samaritan, pouring in oil and wine, refer both
+to the total fruit-gift in both kinds: but in the study of plants, we must
+primarily separate our notion of their gifts to men into the three
+elements, flour, oil, and wine; and have instantly and always intelligible
+names for them in Latin, French, and English.
+
+And I think it best not to confuse our ideas of pure vegetable substance
+with the possible process of fermentation:--so that rather than 'wine,' for
+a constant specific term, I will take 'Nectar,'--this term more rightly
+including the juices of the peach, nectarine, and plum, as well as those of
+the grape, currant, and apple.
+
+Our three separate substances will then be easily named in all three
+languages:
+
+  Farina.            Oleum.             Nectar.
+  Farine.            Huile.             Nectare.
+  Flour.             Oil.               Nectar.
+
+{230}
+
+There is this farther advantage in keeping the third common term, that it
+leaves us the words Succus, Jus, Juice, for other liquid products of
+plants, watery, milky, sugary, or resinous,--often indeed important to man,
+but often also without either agreeable flavor or nutritious power; and it
+is therefore to be observed with care that we may use the word 'juice,' of
+a liquid produced by any part of a plant, but 'nectar,' only of the juices
+produced in its fruit.
+
+6. But the good and pleasure of fruit is not in the juice only;--in some
+kinds, and those not the least valuable, (as the date,) it is not in the
+juice at all. We still stand absolutely in want of a word to express the
+more or less firm _substance_ of fruit, as distinguished from all other
+products of a plant. And with the usual ill-luck,--(I advisedly think of it
+as demoniacal misfortune)--of botanical science, no other name has been yet
+used for such substance than the entirely false and ugly one of
+'Flesh,'--Fr., 'Chair,' with its still more painful derivation 'Charnu,'
+and in England the monstrous scientific term, 'Sarco-carp.'
+
+But, under the housewifery of Proserpina, since we are to call the juice of
+fruit, Nectar, its substance will be as naturally and easily called
+Ambrosia; and I have no doubt that this, with the other names defined in
+this chapter, will not only be found practically more convenient than the
+phrases in common use, but will more securely fix in the student's mind a
+true conception of {231} the essential differences in substance, which,
+ultimately, depend wholly on their pleasantness to human perception, and
+offices for human good; and not at all on any otherwise explicable
+structure or faculty. It is of no use to determine, by microscope or
+retort, that cinnamon is made of cells with so many walls, or grape-juice
+of molecules with so many sides;--we are just as far as ever from
+understanding why these particular interstices should be aromatic, and
+these special parallelopipeds exhilarating, as we were in the savagely
+unscientific days when we could only see with our eyes, and smell with our
+noses. But to call each of these separate substances by a name rightly
+belonging to it through all the past variations of the language of educated
+man, will probably enable us often to discern powers in the thing itself,
+of affecting the human body and mind, which are indeed qualities infinitely
+more its _own_, than any which can possibly be extracted by the point of a
+knife, or brayed out with a mortar and pestle.
+
+7. Thus, to take merely instance in the three main elements of which we
+have just determined the names,--flour, oil, and ambrosia;--the differences
+in the kinds of pleasure which the tongue received from the powderiness of
+oat-cake, or a well-boiled potato--(in the days when oat-cake and potatoes
+were!)--from the glossily-softened crispness of a well-made salad, and from
+the cool and fragrant amber of an apricot, are indeed distinctions between
+the essential virtues of things which {232} were made to be _tasted_, much
+more than to be eaten; and in their various methods of ministry to, and
+temptation of, human appetites, have their part in the history, not of
+elements merely, but of souls; and of the soul-virtues, which from the
+beginning of the world have bade the barrel of meal not waste, nor the
+cruse of oil fail; and have planted, by waters of comfort, the fruits which
+are for the healing of nations.
+
+8. And, again, therefore, I must repeat, with insistance, the claim I have
+made for the limitation of language to the use made of it by educated men.
+The word 'carp' could never have multiplied itself into the absurdities of
+endo-carps and epi-carps, but in the mouths of men who scarcely ever read
+it in its original letters, and therefore never recognized it as meaning
+precisely the same thing as 'fructus,' which word, being a little more
+familiar with, they would have scarcely abused to the same extent; they
+would not have called a walnut shell an intra-fruct--or a grape skin an
+extra-fruct; but again, because, though they are accustomed to the English
+'fructify,' 'frugivorous'--and 'usufruct,' they are unaccustomed to the
+Latin 'fruor,' and unconscious therefore that the derivative 'fructus' must
+always, in right use, mean an _enjoyed_ thing, they generalize every mature
+vegetable product under the term; and we find Dr. Gray coolly telling us
+that there is no fruit so "likely to be mistaken for a seed," as a grain of
+corn! a grain, whether of corn, or any other {233} grass, being precisely
+the vegetable structure to which frutescent change is forever forbidden!
+and to which the word _seed_ is primarily and perfectly applicable!--the
+thing to be _sown_, not grafted.
+
+9. But to mark this total incapability of frutescent change, and connect
+the form of the seed more definitely with its dusty treasure, it is better
+to reserve, when we are speaking with precision, the term 'grain' for the
+seeds of the grasses: the difficulty is greater in French than in English:
+because they have no monosyllabic word for the constantly granular 'seed';
+but for us the terms are all simple, and already in right use, only not
+quite clearly enough understood; and there remains only one real difficulty
+now in our system of nomenclature, that having taken the word 'husk' for
+the seed-vessel, we are left without a general word for the true fringe of
+a filbert, or the chaff of a grass. I don't know whether the French
+'frange' could be used by them in this sense, if we took it in English
+botany. But for the present, we can manage well enough without it, one
+general term, 'chaff,' serving for all the grasses, 'cup' for acorns, and
+'fringe' for nuts.
+
+10. But I call this a _real_ difficulty, because I suppose, among the
+myriads of plants of which I know nothing, there may be forms of the
+envelope of fruits or seeds which may, for comfort of speech, require some
+common generic name. One _un_real difficulty, or shadow of difficulty,
+remains in our having no entirely comprehensive {234} name for seed and
+seed-vessel together than that the botanists now use, 'fruit.' But
+practically, even now, people feel that they can't gather figs of thistles,
+and never speak of the fructification of a thistle, or of the fruit of a
+dandelion. And, re-assembling now, in one view, the words we have
+determined on, they will be found enough for all practical service, and in
+such service always accurate, and, usually, suggestive. I repeat them in
+brief order, with such farther explanation as they need.
+
+11. All ripe products of the life of flowers consist essentially of the
+Seed and Husk,--these being, in certain cases, sustained, surrounded, or
+provided with means of motion, by other parts of the plant; or by
+developments of their own form which require in each case distinct names.
+Thus the white cushion of the dandelion to which its brown seeds are
+attached, and the personal parachutes which belong to each, must be
+separately described for that species of plants; it is the little brown
+thing they sustain and carry away on the wind, which must be examined as
+the essential product of the floret;--the 'seed and husk.'
+
+12. Every seed has a husk, holding either that seed alone, or other seeds
+with it.
+
+Every perfect seed consists of an embryo, and the substance which first
+nourishes that embryo; the whole enclosed in a sack or other sufficient
+envelope. Three essential parts altogether. {235}
+
+Every perfect husk, vulgarly pericarp, or 'round-fruit,'--(as periwig,
+'round-wig,')--consists of a shell, (vulgarly endocarp,) rind, (vulgarly
+mesocarp,) and skin, (vulgarly epicarp); three essential parts altogether.
+But one or more of these parts may be effaced, or confused with another;
+and in the seeds of grasses they all concentrate themselves into bran.
+
+13. When a husk consists of two or more parts, each of which has a separate
+shaft and volute, uniting in the pillar and volute of the flower, each
+separate piece of the husk is called a 'carpel.' The name was first given
+by De Candolle, and must be retained. But it continually happens that a
+simple husk divides into two parts corresponding to the two leaves of the
+embryo, as in the peach, or symmetrically holding alternate seeds, as in
+the pea. The beautiful drawing of the pea-shell with its seeds, in
+Rousseau's botany, is the only one I have seen which rightly shows and
+expresses this arrangement.
+
+14. A Fruit is either the husk, receptacle, petal, or other part of a
+flower _external to the seed_, in which chemical changes have taken place,
+fitting it for the most part to become pleasant and healthful food for man,
+or other living animals; but in some cases making it bitter or poisonous to
+them, and the enjoyment of it depraved or deadly. But, as far as we know,
+it is without any definite office to the seed it contains; and the change
+takes {236} place entirely to fit the plant to the service of animals.[66]
+
+In its perfection, the Fruit Gift is limited to a temperate zone, of which
+the polar limit is marked by the strawberry, and the equatorial by the
+orange. The more arctic regions produce even the smallest kinds of fruit
+with difficulty; and the more equatorial, in coarse, oleaginous, or
+over-luscious masses.
+
+15. All the most perfect fruits are developed _from exquisite forms either
+of foliage or flower_. The vine leaf, in its generally decorative power, is
+the most important, both in life and in art, of all that shade the
+habitations of men. The olive leaf is, without any rival, the most
+beautiful of the leaves of timber trees; and its blossom, though minute, of
+extreme beauty. The apple is essentially the fruit of the rose, and the
+peach of her only rival in her own colour. The cherry and orange blossom
+are the two types of floral snow.
+
+16. And, lastly, let my readers be assured, the economy of blossom and
+fruit, with the distribution of water, {237} will be found hereafter the
+most accurate test of wise national government.
+
+For example of the action of a national government, rightly so called, in
+these matters, I refer the student to the Mariegolas of Venice, translated
+in Fors Clavigera; and I close this chapter, and this first volume of
+Proserpina, not without pride, in the words I wrote on this same matter
+eighteen years ago. "So far as the labourer's immediate profit is
+concerned, it matters not an iron filing whether I employ him in growing a
+peach, or in forging a bombshell. But the difference to him is final,
+whether, when his child is ill, I walk into his cottage, and give it the
+peach,--or drop the shell down his chimney, and blow his roof off."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{238}
+
+INDEX I.
+
+DESCRIPTIVE NOMENCLATURE.
+
+Plants in perfect form are said, at page 26, to consist of four principal
+parts: root, stem, leaf, and flower. (Compare Chapter V., Sec. 2.) The reader
+may have been surprised at the omission of the fruit from this list. But a
+plant which has borne fruit is no longer of 'perfect' form. Its flower is
+dead. And, observe, it is further said, at page 65, (and compare Chapter
+III., Sec. 2,) that the use of the fruit is to produce the flower: not of the
+flower to produce the fruit. Therefore, the plant in perfect blossom, is
+itself perfect. Nevertheless, the formation of the fruit, practically, is
+included in the flower, and so spoken of in the fifteenth line of the same
+page.
+
+Each of these four main parts of a plant consist normally of a certain
+series of minor parts, to which it is well to attach easily remembered
+names. In this section of my index I will not admit the confusion of idea
+involved by alphabetical arrangement of these names, but will sacrifice
+facility of reference to clearness of explanation, and taking the four
+great parts of the plant in {239} succession, I will give the list of the
+minor and constituent parts, with their names as determined in Proserpina,
+and reference to the pages where the reasons for such determination are
+given, endeavouring to supply, at the same time, any deficiencies which I
+find in the body of the text.
+
+I. THE ROOT.
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+  Origin of the word Root                                     27
+
+  The offices of the root are threefold: namely,
+  Tenure, Nourishment, and Animation                       27-34
+
+  The essential parts of a Root are two: the Limbs
+  and Fibres                                                  33
+
+  I. THE LIMB is the gathered mass of fibres, or at
+  least of fibrous substance, which extends itself
+  in search of nourishment                                    32
+
+  II. THE FIBRE is the organ by which the nourishment
+  is received                                                 32
+
+  The inessential or accidental parts of roots, which
+  are attached to the roots of some plants, but
+  not to those of others, (and are, indeed, for the
+  most part absent,) are three: namely, Store-Houses,
+  Refuges, and Ruins                                          34
+
+  III. Store-houses contain the food of the future
+  plant                                                       34
+
+  {240}
+
+  IV. REFUGES shelter the future plant itself for a
+  time                                                        35
+
+  V. RUINS form a basis for the growth of the future
+  plant in its proper order                                   36
+
+  Root-Stocks, the accumulation of such ruins in a vital
+  order                                                       37
+
+  General questions relating to the office and chemical
+  power of roots                                              38
+
+  /#
+  The nomenclature of Roots will not be extended, in
+  Proserpina, beyond the five simple terms here given:
+  though the ordinary botanical ones--corm, bulb, tuber,
+  etc.--will be severally explained in connection with the
+  plants which they specially characterize.
+  #/
+
+II. THE STEM.
+
+  Derivation of word                                         137
+
+  The channel of communication between leaf and
+  root                                                       153
+
+  In a perfect plant it consists of three parts:
+
+  I. THE STEM (STEMMA) proper.--A growing or advancing
+  shoot which sustains all the other
+  organs of the plant                                        136
+
+  It may grow by adding thickness to its sides without
+  advancing; but its essential characteristic is
+  the vital power of Advance                                 136
+  {241}
+
+  It may be round, square, or polygonal, but is always
+  roundly minded                                             136
+
+  Its structural power is Spiral                             137
+
+  It is essentially branched; having subordinate leaf-stalks
+  and flower-stalks, if not larger branches                  139
+
+  It developes the buds, leaves, and flowers of the
+  plant.
+
+  This power is not yet properly defined, or explained;
+  and referred to only incidentally throughout
+  the eighth chapter                                     134-138
+
+  II. THE LEAF-STALK (CYMBA) sustains, and expands
+  itself into, the Leaf                                 133, 134
+
+  It is essentially furrowed above, and convex below         134
+
+  It is to be called in Latin, the Cymba; in English,
+  the Leaf-Stalk                                             135
+
+  III. THE FLOWER-STALK (PETIOLUS):
+
+  It is essentially round                                    130
+
+  It is usually separated distinctly at its termination
+  from the flower                                       130, 131
+
+  It is to be called in Latin, Petiolus; in English,
+  Flower-stalk                                               130
+
+  These three are the essential parts of a stem. But
+  {242}
+  besides these, it has, when largely developed, a
+  permanent form: namely,
+
+  IV. THE TRUNK.--A non-advancing mass of collected
+  stem, arrested at a given height from the
+  ground                                                     139
+
+  /#
+  The stems of annual plants are either leafy, as of a
+  thistle, or bare, sustaining the flower or flower-cluster at
+  a certain height above the ground. Receiving therefore
+  these following names:---
+  #/
+
+  V. THE VIRGA.--The leafy stem of an annual plant,
+  not a grass, yet growing upright                           147
+
+  VI. THE VIRGULA.--The leafless flower-stem of an
+  annual plant, not a grass, as of a primrose or
+  dandelion                                                  147
+
+  VII. THE FILUM.--The running stem of a creeping
+  plant
+
+  /#
+  It is not specified in the text for use; but will be necessary;
+  so also, perhaps, the Stelechos, or stalk proper (26),
+  the branched stem of an annual plant, not a grass; one
+  cannot well talk of the Virga of hemlock. The 'Stolon'
+  is explained in its classical sense at page 158, but I believe
+  botanists use it otherwise. I shall have occasion
+  to refer to, and complete its explanation, in speaking of
+  bulbous plants.
+  #/
+
+  VIII. THE CAUDEX.--The essentially ligneous and
+  compact part of a stem                                     149
+
+  {243}
+
+  /#
+  This equivocal word is not specified for use in the text,
+  but I mean to keep it for the accumulated stems of inlaid
+  plants, palms, and the like; for which otherwise we have
+  no separate term.
+  #/
+
+  IX. THE AVENA.--Not specified in the text at all;
+  but it will be prettier than 'baculus,' which is
+  that I had proposed, for the 'staff' of grasses.
+  See page 179.
+
+  /#
+  These ten names are all that the student need remember;
+  but he will find some interesting particulars respecting
+  the following three, noticed in the text:---
+  #/
+
+  STIPS.--The origin of stipend, stupid, and stump           148
+
+  STIPULA.--The subtlest Latin term for straw                148
+
+  CAULIS (Kale).--The peculiar stem of branched eatable
+  vegetables                                                 149
+
+  CANNA.--Not noticed in the text; but likely to be
+  sometimes useful for the stronger stems of
+  grasses.
+
+III. THE LEAF.
+
+  Derivation of word                                          26
+
+  The Latin form 'folium'                                     41
+
+  The Greek form 'petalos'                                    42
+
+  Veins and ribs of leaves, to be usually summed under
+  the term 'rib'                                              44
+
+  Chemistry of leaves                                         46
+  {244}
+
+  /#
+  The nomenclature of the leaf consists, in botanical
+  books, of little more than barbarous, and, for the general
+  reader, totally useless attempts to describe their
+  forms in Latin. But their forms are infinite and indescribable
+  except by the pencil. I will give central types of
+  form in the next volume of Proserpina; which, so that
+  the reader sees and remembers, he may _call_ anything he
+  likes. But it is necessary that names should be assigned
+  to certain classes of leaves which are essentially different
+  from each other in character and tissue, not merely
+  in form. Of these the two main divisions have been
+  already given: but I will now add the less important
+  ones which yet require distinct names.
+  #/
+
+  I. APOLLINE.--Typically represented by the laurel           51
+
+  II. ARETHUSAN.--Represented by the alisma                   52
+
+  /#
+  It ought to have been noticed that the character of serration,
+  within reserved limits, is essential to an Apolline
+  leaf, and absolutely refused by an Arethusan one.
+  #/
+
+  III. DRYAD.--Of the ordinary leaf tissue, neither
+  manifestly strong, nor admirably tender, but
+  serviceably consistent, which we find generally
+  to be the substance of the leaves of forest trees.
+  Typically represented by those of the oak.
+
+  IV. ABIETINE.--Shaft or sword-shape, as the leaves
+  of firs and pines.
+
+  V. CRESSIC.--Delicate and light, with smooth tissue,
+  as the leaves of cresses, and clover.
+  {245}
+
+  VI. SALVIAN.--Soft and woolly, like miniature
+  blankets, easily folded, as the leaves of sage.
+
+  VII. CAULINE.--Softly succulent, with thick central
+  ribs, as of the cabbage.
+
+  VIII. ALOEINE.--Inflexibly succulent, as of the
+  aloe or houseleek.
+
+  /#
+  No rigid application of these terms must ever be attempted;
+  but they direct the attention to important general
+  conditions, and will often be found to save time and
+  trouble in description.
+  #/
+
+IV. THE FLOWER.
+
+  Its general nature and function                             65
+
+  Consists essentially of Corolla and Treasury                78
+
+  Has in perfect form the following parts:--
+
+  I. THE TORUS.--Not yet enough described in the
+  text. It is the expansion of the extremity of
+  the flower-stalk, in preparation for the support
+  of the expanding flower                                66, 224
+
+  II. THE INVOLUCRUM.--Any kind of wrapping or
+  propping condition of leafage at the base of a
+  flower may properly come under this head; but
+  the manner of prop or protection differs in different
+  kinds, and I will not at present give generic
+  names to these peculiar forms.
+
+  {246}
+  III. THE CALYX (The Hiding-place).--The outer
+  whorl of leaves, under the protection of which
+  the real flower is brought to maturity. Its separate
+  leaves are called SEPALS                                    80
+
+  IV. THE COROLLA (The Cup).--The inner whorl of
+  leaves, forming the flower itself. Its separate
+  leaves are called PETALS                                    71
+
+  V. THE TREASURY.--The part of the flower that
+  contains its seeds.
+
+  VI. THE PILLAR.--The part of the flower above its
+  treasury, by which the power of the pollen is
+  carried down to the seeds                                   78
+
+  It consists usually of two parts--the SHAFT and
+  VOLUTE                                                      78
+
+  When the pillar is composed of two or more shafts,
+  attached to separate treasury-cells, each cell
+  with its shaft is called a CARPEL                          235
+
+  VII. THE STAMENS.--The parts of the flower which
+  secrete its pollen                                          78
+
+  They consist usually of two parts, the FILAMENT and
+  ANTHER, not yet described.
+
+  VIII. THE NECTARY.--The part of the flower containing
+  its honey, or any other special product
+  of its inflorescence. The name has often been
+  {247}
+  given to certain forms of petals of which the
+  use is not yet known. No notice has yet been
+  taken of this part of the flower in Proserpina.
+
+  /#
+  These being all the essential parts of the flower itself,
+  other forms and substances are developed in the seed as it
+  ripens, which, I believe, may most conveniently be arranged
+  in a separate section, though not logically to be
+  considered as separable from the flower, but only as
+  mature states of certain parts of it.
+  #/
+
+V. THE SEED.
+
+I must once more desire the reader to take notice that, under the four
+sections already defined, the morphology of the plant is to be considered
+as complete, and that we are now only to examine and name, farther, its
+_product_; and that not so much as the germ of its own future descendant
+flower, but as a separate substance which it is appointed to form, partly
+to its own detriment, for the sake of higher creatures. This product
+consists essentially of two parts: the Seed and its Husk.
+
+  I. THE SEED.--Defined                                      220
+
+  It consists, in its perfect form, of three parts           222
+
+  /#
+  These three parts are not yet determinately named in
+  the text: but I give now the names which will be usually
+  attached to them.
+  #/
+
+  A. _The Sacque_.--The outside skin of a seed               221
+
+  {248}
+
+  B. _The Nutrine_.--A word which I coin, for general
+  applicability, whether to the farina of
+  corn, the substance of a nut, or the parts that
+  become the first leaves in a bean                          221
+
+  C. _The Germ_.--The origin of the root                     221
+
+  II. THE HUSK.--Defined                                     222
+
+  Consists, like the seed when in perfect form, of
+  three parts.
+
+  A. _The Skin_.--The outer envelope of all the
+  seed structures                                            222
+
+  B. _The Rind_.--The central body of the Husk.          222-235
+
+  C. _The Shell_.--Not always shelly, yet best described
+  by this general term; and becoming
+  a shell, so called, in nuts, peaches, dates, and
+  other such kernel-fruits                                   222
+
+  The products of the Seed and Husk of Plants, for
+  the use of animals, are practically to be massed
+  under the three heads of BREAD, OIL, and FRUIT.
+  But the substance of which bread is made is
+  more accurately described as Farina; and the
+  pleasantness of fruit to the taste depends on two
+  elements in its substance: the juice, and the
+  pulp containing it, which may properly be
+  called Nectar and Ambrosia. We have therefore
+  in all four essential products of the Seed
+  and Husk--
+
+  {249}
+  A. Farina.    Flour                                        227
+
+  B. Oleum.     Oil                                          229
+
+  C. Nectar.    Fruit-juice                                  229
+
+  D. Ambrosia.  Fruit-substance                              230
+
+
+Besides these all-important products of the seed, others are formed in the
+stems and leaves of plants, of which no account hitherto has been given in
+Proserpina. I delay any extended description of these until we have
+examined the structure of wood itself more closely; this intricate and
+difficult task having been remitted (p. 195) to the days of coming spring;
+and I am well pleased that my younger readers should at first be vexed with
+no more names to be learned than those of the vegetable productions with
+which they are most pleasantly acquainted: but for older ones, I think it
+well, before closing the present volume, to indicate, with warning, some of
+the obscurities, and probable fallacies, with which this vanity of science
+encumbers the chemistry, no less than the morphology, of plants.
+
+Looking back to one of the first books in which our new knowledge of
+organic chemistry began to be displayed, thirty years ago, I find that even
+at that period the organic elements which the cuisine of the laboratory had
+already detected in simple Indigo, were the following:-- {250}
+
+  Isatine, Bromisatine, Bidromisatine;
+  Chlorisatine, Bichlorisatine;
+  Chlorisatyde, Bichlorisatyde;
+  Chlorindine, Chlorindoptene, Chlorindatmit;
+  Chloranile, Chloranilam, and, Chloranilammon.
+
+And yet, with all this practical skill in decoction, and accumulative
+industry in observation and nomenclature, so far are our scientific men
+from arriving, by any decoctive process of their own knowledge, at general
+results useful to ordinary human creatures, that when I wish now to
+separate, for young scholars, in first massive arrangement of vegetable
+productions, the Substances of Plants from their Essences; that is to say,
+the weighable and measurable body of the plant from its practically
+immeasurable, if not imponderable, spirit, I find in my three volumes of
+close-printed chemistry, no information what ever respecting the quality of
+volatility in matter, except this one sentence:--
+
+"The disposition of various substances to yield vapour is very different:
+and the difference depends doubtless on the relative power of cohesion with
+which they are endowed."[67]
+
+Even in this not extremely pregnant, though extremely {251} cautious,
+sentence, two conditions of matter are confused, no notice being taken of
+the difference in manner of dissolution between a vitally fragrant and a
+mortally putrid substance.
+
+It is still more curious that when I look for more definite instruction on
+such points to the higher ranks of botanists, I find in the index to Dr.
+Lindley's 'Introduction to Botany'--seven hundred pages of close print--not
+one of the four words 'Volatile,' 'Essence,' 'Scent,' or 'Perfume.' I
+examine the index to Gray's 'Structural and Systematic Botany,' with
+precisely the same success. I next consult Professors Balfour and Grindon,
+and am met by the same dignified silence. Finally, I think over the
+possible chances in French, and try in Figuier's indices to the 'Histoire
+des Plantes' for 'Odeur'--no such word! 'Parfum'--no such word.
+'Essence'--no such word. 'Encens'--no such word. I try at last 'Pois de
+Senteur,' at a venture, and am referred to a page which describes their
+going to sleep.
+
+Left thus to my own resources, I must be content for the present to bring
+the subject at least under safe laws of nomenclature. It is possible that
+modern chemistry may be entirely right in alleging the absolute identity of
+substances such as albumen, or fibrine, whether they occur in the animal or
+vegetable economies. But I do not choose to assume this identity in my
+nomenclature. It may, perhaps, be very fine and very instructive to {252}
+inform the pupils preparing for competitive examination that the main
+element of Milk is Milkine, and of Cheese, Cheesine. But for the practical
+purposes of life, all that I think it necessary for the pupil to know is
+that in order to get either milk or cheese, he must address himself to a
+Cow, and not to a Pump; and that what a chemist can produce for him out of
+dandelions or cocoanuts, however milky or cheesy it may look, may more
+safely be called by some name of its own.
+
+This distinctness of language becomes every day more desirable, in the face
+of the refinements of chemical art which now enable the ingenious
+confectioner to meet the demands of an unscientific person for (suppose) a
+lemon drop, with a mixture of nitric acid, sulphur, and stewed bones. It is
+better, whatever the chemical identity of the products may be, that each
+should receive a distinctive epithet, and be asked for and supplied, in
+vulgar English, and vulgar probity, either as essence of lemons, or
+skeletons.
+
+I intend, therefore,--and believe that the practice will be found both wise
+and convenient,--to separate in all my works on natural history the terms
+used for vegetable products from those used for animal or mineral ones,
+whatever may be their chemical identity, or resemblance in aspect. I do not
+mean to talk of fat in seeds, nor of flour in eggs, nor of milk in rocks.
+Pace my prelatical friends, I mean to use the word 'Alb' for vegetable
+albumen; and although I cannot without pedantry avoid {253} using sometimes
+the word 'milky' of the white juices of plants, I must beg the reader to
+remain unaffected in his conviction that there is a vital difference
+between liquids that coagulate into butter, or congeal into India-rubber.
+Oil, when used simply, will always mean a vegetable product: and when I
+have occasion to speak of petroleum, tallow, or blubber, I shall generally
+call these substances by their right names.
+
+There are also a certain number of vegetable materials more or less
+prepared, secreted, or digested for us by animals, such as wax, honey,
+silk, and cochineal. The properties of these require more complex
+definitions, but they have all very intelligible and well-established
+names. 'Tea' must be a general term for an extract of any plant in boiling
+water: though when standing alone the word will take its accepted Chinese
+meaning: and essence, the general term for the condensed dew of a vegetable
+vapour, which is with grace and fitness called the 'being' of a plant,
+because its properties are almost always characteristic of the species; and
+it is not, like leaf tissue or wood fibre, approximately the same material
+in different shapes; but a separate element in each family of flowers, of a
+mysterious, delightful, or dangerous influence, logically inexplicable,
+chemically inconstructible, and wholly, in dignity of nature, above all
+modes and faculties of form.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{254}
+
+INDEX II.
+
+TO THE PLANTS SPOKEN OF IN THIS VOLUME, UNDER THEIR ENGLISH NAMES, ACCEPTED
+BY PROSERPINA.
+
+  Apple, 102
+  Ash, 120, 127
+  Aspen, 134
+  Asphodel, 8, 36
+  Bay, 51
+  Bean, 104
+  Bed-straw, 120
+  Bindweed, 144
+  Birch, 172
+  Blackthorn, 119, 127
+  Blaeberry, 52, 206
+  Bluebell, 144
+  Bramble, 119, 195
+  Burdock, 112, 131
+  Burnet, 95
+  Butterbur, 118
+  Cabbage, 131, 149
+  Captain-salad, 149
+  Carrot, 32, 35
+  Cauliflower, 131, 149
+  Cedar, 35, 61, 113
+  Celandine, 72
+  Cherry, 65, 130
+  Chestnut, 62
+     "   Spanish, 166
+  Chicory, 118
+  Clover, 111
+  Colewort, 149
+  Coltsfoot, 110
+  Corn-cockle, 108
+  Corn-flag, 104, 109
+  Cowslip, 139
+  Crocus, 36, 37
+  Daffodil,
+  {255}
+  Daisy, 117, 144, 145
+  Dandelion, 117
+  Devil's Bit, 147
+  Dock, 131
+  Elm, 52
+  Fig, 63
+  Flag, 104
+  Flax, 165
+  Foils, Rock, 144
+     "   Roof, 144, 146
+  Foxglove, 70, 118, 139
+  Frog-flower, 56
+  Grape, 103, 130
+  Grass, 52, 53, 55, 156, 158, 161, 163
+  Hawk's-eye, 118
+  Hazel, 120
+  Heath, 67, 68, 107, 208
+  Hemlock, 107
+  Herb-Robert, 121
+  Holly, 113, 119
+  Houseleek, 37, 146
+  Hyacinth, 65, 67
+  Ivy, 111
+  Jacinth, 83, 186
+  King-cup, 110
+  Laurel, 35, 59, 140
+     "   leaves, 43, 51, 60
+  Lichen, 175
+  Lilac, 76
+  Lily, 1, 36, 53, 104, 109
+  Lily, St. Bruno's, 1, 7, 9, 10
+  Lily of the Valley, 143
+  Lily, Water, 55, 72
+  Ling, 68, 69
+  Lion's-tooth, 113
+  Liquorice, 38
+  Lucy, 110, 144
+  Mistletoe, 111
+  Moss, 12, 15, 175
+  Mushroom, 43, 127
+  Myrtle, 51
+  Nettle, 52, 88, 107
+  Nightshade, 108
+  Oak, 36, 140
+     "   blossom, 67
+  Olive, 51, 63, 142
+  Onion, 38
+  Orange, 51
+  Paeony, 129
+  Palm, 43, 53, 54, 103, 156, 166
+  {256}
+  Pansy, 120, 144
+  Papilionaceae, 145
+  Papyrus, 165
+  Pea, 32, 144
+  Peach, 130, 144
+  Pine, 140
+  Pineapple, 14
+  Pink, 144
+  Plantain, 134
+  Pomegranate, 102
+  Poplar, 52
+  Poppy, 70, 76, 86, 104
+  Primrose, 79, 144
+  Radish, 35, 38
+  Ragged Robin, 155
+  Rhubarb, 131
+  Rice, 52
+  Rock-foil, 144
+  Roof-foil, 144, 146
+  Rose, 64, 69, 75, 104, 109, 119, 121, 129, 144
+  Rush, 157
+  Saxifrage, 120, 143, 146
+  Scabious, 147
+  Sedum, 146
+  Sorrel-wood, 9
+  Spider Plant, 8
+  Sponsa solis, 118
+  Stella, 144, 146
+     "   domestica, 146
+  Stonecrop, 146
+  Sweetbriar, 109
+  Thistle, 103, 104, 113, 117, 118, 121, 144 _note_, 151
+  Thistle, Creeping, 138
+     "   Waste, 138
+  Thorns, 121, 127
+     "   Black, 119, 127
+  Thyme, 118
+  Tobacco, 38, 108
+  Tormentilla, 110
+  Turnip, 35
+  Vine, 104, 108, 140, 142
+  Viola, 144
+  Wallflower, 111
+  Wheat, 127, 165
+  Wreathewort, 181
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{257}
+
+INDEX III.
+
+TO THE PLANTS SPOKEN OF IN THIS VOLUME, UNDER THEIR LATIN OR GREEK NAMES,
+ACCEPTED BY PROSERPINA.
+
+  Acanthus, 104
+  Alata, 144
+  Alisma, 52
+  Amaryllis, 36, 37
+  Anemone, 107
+  Artemides, 196
+  Asphodel, 11
+  Aurora, 207
+  Azalea, 207
+  Cactus, 43
+  Campanula, 144
+  Carduus, 138
+  Charites, 188
+  Cistus, 69
+  Clarissa, 144, 155
+  Contorta, 181
+  Convoluta, 144
+  Cyclamen, 32
+  Drosidae, 36, 199
+  Ensatae, 203
+  Ericae, 9, 206
+  Eryngo, 83
+  Fragaria, 188
+  Francesca, 144, 146
+  Fraxinus, 195
+  Geranium, 83, 120
+  Gladiolus, 104, 109, 163
+  Hyacinthus, 186
+  Hypnum, 13
+  Iris, 36, 103
+  Lilium (_see_ Lily), 8
+  Lucia, 110, 189
+  {258}
+  Magnolia, 51
+  Margarita, 144
+  Myrtilla, 206
+  Narcissus, 109
+  Ophrys, 180
+  Papaver, 91, 96
+  Persica, 144
+  Pomum, 188
+  Primula, 143
+  Rosa, 144
+  Rubra, 188, 195
+  Satyrium, 182
+  Stella, 144, 146
+  Veronica, 75
+  Viola, 144
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Notes
+
+[1] At least, it throws off its flowers on each side in a bewilderingly
+pretty way; a real lily can't branch, I believe: but, if not, what is the
+use of the botanical books saying "on an unbranched stem"?
+
+[2] I have by happy chance just added to my Oxford library the poet Gray's
+copy of Linnaeus, with its exquisitely written Latin notes, exemplary alike
+to scholar and naturalist.
+
+[3] It was in the year 1860, in June.
+
+[4] Admirably engraved by Mr. Burgess, from my pen drawing, now at Oxford.
+By comparing it with the plate of the same flower in Sowerby's work, the
+student will at once see the difference between attentive drawing, which
+gives the cadence and relation of masses in a group, and the mere copying
+of each flower in an unconsidered huddle.
+
+[5] "Histoire des Plantes." Ed. 1865, p. 416.
+
+[6] The like of it I have now painted, Number 281, CASE XII., in the
+Educational Series of Oxford.
+
+[7] Properly, Florae Danicae, but it is so tiresome to print the diphthongs
+that I shall always call it thus. It is a folio series, exquisitely begun,
+a hundred years ago; and not yet finished.
+
+[8] Magnified about seven times. See note at end of this chapter.
+
+[9] American,--'System of Botany,' the best technical book I have.
+
+[10] 'Dicranum cerviculatum,' sequel to Flora Danica, Tab. MMCCX.
+
+[11] The reader should buy a small specimen of this mineral; it is a useful
+type of many structures.
+
+[12] LUCCA, _Aug. 9th, 1874._--I have left this passage as originally
+written, but I believe the dome is of accumulated earth. Bringing home,
+here, evening after evening, heaps of all kinds of mosses from the hills
+among which the Archbishop Ruggieri was hunting the wolf and her whelps in
+Ugolino's dream, I am more and more struck, every day, with their special
+function as earth-gatherers, and with the enormous importance to their own
+brightness, and to our service, of that dark and degraded state of the
+inferior leaves. And it fastens itself in my mind mainly as their
+distinctive character, that as the leaves of a tree become wood, so the
+leaves of a moss become earth, while yet a normal part of the plant. Here
+is a cake in my hand weighing half a pound, bright green on the surface,
+with minute crisp leaves; but an inch thick beneath in what looks at first
+like clay, but is indeed knitted fibre of exhausted moss. Also, I don't at
+all find the generalization I made from the botanical books likely to have
+occurred to me from the real things. No moss leaves that I can find here
+give me the idea of resemblance to pineapple leaves; nor do I see any,
+through my weak lens, clearly serrated; but I do find a general tendency to
+run into a silky filamentous structure, and in some, especially on a small
+one gathered from the fissures in the marble of the cathedral, white
+threads of considerable length at the extremities of the leaves, of which
+threads I remember no drawing or notice in the botanical books. Figure 1
+represents, magnified, a cluster of these leaves, with the germinating
+stalk springing from their centre; but my scrawl was tired and careless,
+and for once, Mr. Burgess has copied _too_ accurately.
+
+[13] Learn this word, at any rate; and if you know any Greek, learn also
+this group of words: "[Greek: hos rhiza en ge dipsosei]," which you may
+chance to meet with, and even to think about, some day.
+
+[14] "Duhamel, botanist of the last century, tells us that, wishing to
+preserve a field of good land from the roots of an avenue of elms which
+were exhausting it, he cut a ditch between the field and avenue to
+intercept the roots. But he saw with surprise those of the roots which had
+not been cut, go down behind the slope of the ditch to keep out of the
+light, go under the ditch, and into the field again." And the Swiss
+naturalist Bonnet said wittily, apropos of a wonder of this sort, "that
+sometimes it was difficult to distinguish a cat from a rosebush."
+
+[15] As the first great office of the mosses is the gathering of earth, so
+that of the grasses is the binding of it. Theirs the Enchanter's toil, not
+in vain,--making ropes out of sea-sand.
+
+[16] Drosidae, in our school nomenclature, is the general name, including
+the four great tribes, iris, asphodel, amaryllis, and lily. See reason for
+this name given in the 'Queen of the Air,' Section II.
+
+[17] The only use of a great part of our existing nomenclature is to enable
+one botanist to describe to another a plant which the other has not seen.
+When the science becomes approximately perfect, all known plants will be
+properly figured, so that nobody need describe them; and unknown plants be
+so rare that nobody will care to learn a new and difficult language, in
+order to be able to give an account of what in all probability he will
+never see.
+
+[18] An excellent book, nevertheless.
+
+[19] Lindley, 'Introduction to Botany,' vol. i., p. 21. The terms "wholly
+obsolete," says an authoritative botanic friend. Thank Heaven!
+
+[20] "You should see the girders on under-side of the Victoria Water-lily,
+the most wonderful bit of engineering, of the kind, I know
+of."--('Botanical friend.')
+
+[21] Roughly, Cyllene 7,700 feet high; Erymanthus 7,000; Maenalus 6,000.
+
+[22] _March 3rd._--We now ascend the roots of the mountain called Kastania,
+and begin to pass between it and the mountain of Alonistena, which is on
+our right. The latter is much higher than Kastania, and, like the other
+peaked summits of the Maenalian range, is covered with firs, and deeply at
+present with snow. The snow lies also in our pass. At a fountain in the
+road, the small village of Bazeniko is half a mile on the right, standing
+at the foot of the Maenalian range, and now covered with snow.
+
+Saeta is the most lofty of the range of mountains, which are in face of
+Levidhi, to the northward and eastward; they are all a part of the chain
+which extends from Mount Khelmos, and connects that great summit with
+Artemisium, Parthenium, and Parnon. Mount Saeta is covered with firs. The
+mountain between the plain of Levidhi and Alonistena, or, to speak by the
+ancient nomenclature, that part of the Maenalian range which separates the
+Orchomenia from the valleys of Helisson and Methydrium, is clothed also
+with large forests of the same trees; the road across this ridge from
+Lavidhi to Alonistena is now impracticable on account of the snow.
+
+I am detained all day at Levidhi by a heavy fall of snow, which before the
+evening has covered the ground to half a foot in depth, although the
+village is not much elevated above the plain, nor in a more lofty situation
+than Tripolitza.
+
+_March 4th._--Yesterday afternoon and during the night the snow fell in
+such quantities as to cover all the plains and adjacent mountains; and the
+country exhibited this morning as fine a snow-scene as Norway could supply.
+As the day advanced and the sun appeared, the snow melted rapidly, but the
+sky was soon overcast again, and the snow began to fall.
+
+[23] Just in time, finding a heap of gold under an oak tree some thousand
+years old, near Arundel, I've made them out: Eight, divided by three; that
+is to say, three couples of petals, with two odd little ones inserted for
+form's sake. No wonder I couldn't decipher them by memory.
+
+[24] Figs. 8 and 9 are both drawn and engraved by Mr. Burgess.
+
+[25] Of Vespertilian science generally, compare 'Eagles' Nest,' pp. 25 and
+179.
+
+[26] The mathematical term is 'rhomb.'
+
+[27] [Greek: hes to sperma artopoieitai.]
+
+[28] [Greek: epimekes echousa to kephalion.] Dioscorides makes no effort to
+distinguish species, but gives the different names as if merely used in
+different places.
+
+[29] It is also used sometimes of the garden poppy, says Dioscorides,
+"[Greek: dia to rhein ex autes ton opon]"--"because the sap, opium, flows
+from it."
+
+[30] See all the passages quoted by Liddell.
+
+[31] I find this chapter rather tiresome on re-reading it myself, and
+cancel some farther criticism of the imitation of this passage by Virgil,
+one of the few pieces of the AEneid which are purely and vulgarly imitative,
+rendered also false as well as weak by the introducing sentence, "Volvitur
+Euryalus leto," after which the simile of the drooping flower is absurd. Of
+criticism, the chief use of which is to warn all sensible men from such
+business, the following abstract of Diderot's notes on the passage, given
+in the 'Saturday Review' for April 29th, 1871, is worth preserving. (Was
+the French critic really not aware that Homer _had_ written the lines his
+own way?)
+
+"Diderot illustrates his theory of poetical hieroglyphs by no quotations,
+but we can show the manner of his minute and sometimes fanciful criticism
+by repeating his analysis of the passage of Virgil wherein the death of
+Euryalus is described:--
+
+                 'Pulchrosque per artus
+  It cruor, inque humeros cervix collapsa recumbit;
+  Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro
+  Languescit moriens; lassove papavera collo
+  Demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur.'
+
+"The sound of 'It cruor,' according to Diderot, suggests the image of a jet
+of blood; 'cervix collapsa recumbit,' the fall of a dying man's head upon
+his shoulder; 'succisus' imitates the use of a cutting scythe (not plough);
+'demisere' is as soft as the eye of a flower; 'gravantur,' on the other
+hand, has all the weight of a calyx, filled with rain; 'collapsa' marks an
+effort and a fall, and similar double duty is performed by 'papavera,' the
+first two syllables symbolizing the poppy upright, the last two the poppy
+bent. While thus pursuing his minute investigations, Diderot can scarcely
+help laughing at himself, and candidly owns that he is open to the
+suspicion of discovering in the poem beauties which have no existence. He
+therefore qualifies his eulogy by pointing out two faults in the passage.
+'Gravantur,' notwithstanding the praise it has received, is a little too
+heavy for the light head of a poppy, even when filled with water. As for
+'aratro,' coming as it does after the hiss of 'succisus,' it is altogether
+abominable. Had Homer written the lines, he would have ended with some
+hieroglyph, which would have continued the hiss or described the fall of a
+flower. To the hiss of 'succisus' Diderot is warmly attached. Not by
+mistake, but in order to justify the sound, he ventures to translate
+'aratrum' into 'scythe,' boldly and rightly declaring in a marginal note
+that this is not the meaning of the word."
+
+[32] And I have too harshly called our English vines, 'wicked weeds of
+Kent,' in Fors Clavigera, xxvii. 11. Much may be said for Ale, when we brew
+it for our people honestly.
+
+[33] Has my reader ever thought,--I never did till this moment,--how it
+perfects the exquisite character which Scott himself loved, as he invented,
+till he changed the form of the novel, that his habitual interjection
+should be this word;--not but that the oath, by conscience, was happily
+still remaining then in Scotland, taking the place of the mediaeval 'by St.
+Andrew,' we in England, long before the Scot, having lost all sense of the
+Puritanical appeal to private conscience, as of the Catholic oath, 'by St.
+George;' and our uncanonized 'by George' in sonorous rudeness, ratifying,
+not now our common conscience, but our individual opinion.
+
+[34] 'Jotham,' 'Sum perfectio eorum,' or 'Consummatio eorum.'
+(Interpretation of name in Vulgate index.)
+
+[35] If you will look at the engraving, in the England and Wales series, of
+Turner's Oakhampton, you will see its use.
+
+[36] General assertions of this kind must always be accepted under
+indulgence,--exceptions being made afterwards.
+
+[37] I use 'round' rather than 'cylindrical,' for simplicity's sake.
+
+[38] Carduus Arvensis. 'Creeping Thistle,' in Sowerby; why, I cannot
+conceive, for there is no more creeping in it than in a furzebush. But it
+especially haunts foul and neglected ground; so I keep the Latin name,
+translating 'Waste-Thistle.' I could not show the variety of the curves of
+the involucre without enlarging; and if, on this much increased scale, I
+had tried to draw the flower, it would have taken Mr. Allen and me a good
+month's more work. And I had no more a month than a life, to spare: so the
+action only of the spreading flower is indicated, but the involucre drawn
+with precision.
+
+[39] The florets gathered in the daisy are cinquefoils, examined closely.
+No system founded on colour can be very general or unexceptionable: but the
+splendid purples of the pansy, and thistle, which will be made one of the
+lower composite groups under Margarita, may justify the general assertion
+of this order's being purple.
+
+[40] See Miss Yonge's exhaustive account of the name, 'History of Christian
+Names,' vol. i., p. 265.
+
+[41] (Du Cange.) The word 'Margarete' is given as heraldic English for
+pearl, by Lady Juliana Berners, in the book of St. Albans.
+
+[42] Recent botanical research makes this statement more than dubitable.
+Nevertheless, on no other supposition can the forms and action of
+tree-branches, so far as at present known to me, be yet clearly accounted
+for.
+
+[43] Not always in muscular power; but the framework on which strong
+muscles are to act, as that of an insect's wing, or its jaw, is never
+insectile.
+
+[44] It is one of the three cadences, (the others being of the words
+rhyming to 'mind' and 'way,') used by Sir Philip Sidney in his marvellous
+paraphrase of the 55th Psalm.
+
+[45] Lectures on the Families of Speech, by the Rev. F. Farrer Longman,
+1870. Page 81.
+
+[46] I only profess, you will please to observe, to ask questions in
+Proserpina. Never to answer any. But of course this chapter is to introduce
+some further inquiry in another place.
+
+[47] See Introduction, pp. 5-8.
+
+[48] See Sowerby's nomenclature of the flower, vol. ix., plate 1703.
+
+[49] Linnaeus used this term for the oleanders; but evidently with less
+accuracy than usual.
+
+[50] "[Greek: anthe porphuroeide]" says Dioscorides, of the race
+generally,--but "[Greek: anthe de hupoporphura]" of this particular one.
+
+[51] I offer a sample of two dozen for good papas and mammas to begin
+with:--
+
+  Angraecum.
+  Anisopetalum.
+  Brassavola.
+  Brassia.
+  Caelogyne.
+  Calopogon.
+  Corallorrhiza.
+  Cryptarrhena.
+  Eulophia.
+  Gymnadenia.
+  Microstylis.
+  Octomeria.
+  Ornithidium.
+  Ornithocephalus.
+  Platanthera.
+  Pleurothallis.
+  Pogonia.
+  Polystachya.
+  Prescotia.
+  Renanthera.
+  Rodriguezia.
+  Stenorhyncus.
+  Trizeuxis.
+  Xylobium.
+
+[52] Compare Chapter V., Sec. 7.
+
+[53] "Jacinthus Jurae," changed from "Hyacinthus Comosus."
+
+[54]
+
+ "Cantando, e scegliendo fior di fiore
+  Onde era picta tutta la sua via."--_Purg._, xxviii. 35.
+
+[55] "[Greek: kai theoisi terpna.]"
+
+[56] The four races of this order are more naturally distinct than
+botanists have recognized. In Clarissa, the petal is cloven into a fringe
+at the outer edge; in Lychnis, the petal is terminated in two rounded lobes
+and the fringe withdrawn to the top of the limb; in Scintilla, the petal is
+divided into two _sharp_ lobes, without any fringe of the limb; and in
+Mica, the minute and scarcely visible flowers have simple and far separate
+petals. The confusion of these four great natural races under the vulgar or
+accidental botanical names of spittle-plant, shore-plant, sand plant, etc.,
+has become entirely intolerable by any rational student; but the names
+'Scintilla,' substituted for Stellaria, and 'Mica' for the utterly
+ridiculous and probably untrue Sagina, connect themselves naturally with
+Lychnis, in expression of the luminous power of the white and sparkling
+blossoms.
+
+[57] Clytia will include all the true sun-flowers, and Falconia the
+hawkweeds; but I have not yet completed the analysis of this vast and
+complex order, so as to determine the limits of Margarita and Alcestis.
+
+[58] The reader must observe that the positions given in this more
+developed system to any flower do not interfere with arrangements either
+formerly or hereafter given for memoria technica. The name of the pea, for
+instance (alata), is to be learned first among the twelve cinqfoils, p.
+214, above; then transferred to its botanical place.
+
+[59] The amphibious habit of this race is to me of more importance than its
+outlaid structure.
+
+[60] "Arctostaphylos Alpina," I believe; but scarcely recognize the flower
+in my botanical books.
+
+[61] 'Aurora Regina,' changed from Rhododendron Ferrugineum.
+
+[62] I do not see what this can mean. Primroses and cowslips can't become
+shrubs; nor can violets, nor daisies, nor any other of our pet meadow
+flowers.
+
+[63] 'Deserts.' Punas is not in my Spanish dictionary, and the reference to
+a former note is wrong in my edition of Humboldt, vol. iii., p. 490.
+
+[64] "The Alpine rose of equinoctial America," p. 453.
+
+[65] More literally "persons to whom the care of eggs is entrusted."
+
+[66] A most singular sign of this function is given to the chemistry of the
+changes, according to a French botanist, to whose carefully and richly
+illustrated volume I shall in future often refer my readers, "Vers l'epoque
+de la maturite, les fruits _exhalent de l'acide carbonique_. Ils ne
+presentent plus des lors aucun degagement d'oxygene pendant le jour, et
+_respirent, pour ainsi dire, a la facon des animaux_."--(Figuier, 'Histoire
+des Plantes,' p. 182. 8vo. Paris. Hachette. 1874.)
+
+[67] 'Elements of Chemistry,' p. 44. By Edward Turner; edited by Justus
+Liebig and William Gregory. Taylor and Walton, 1840.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Corrections made to printed original.
+
+p.27. "In Greek, [Greek: rhiza]" - "[Greek: riza]" with soft breath mark in
+original.
+
+p.62. "shall it not be said of England?" - "no be said" in original.
+
+ibid. "beneficent in fulfilment" - "benet ficent" (across 2 lines) in
+original.
+
+p.71. "flaunting breadth of untenable purple" - "untenabie" in original.
+
+p.145. "to warn them that this trial of their lovers" - "warm them" in
+original.
+
+p.195. "XI. HESPERIDES." - "II." in original.
+
+p.238. "at page 26" - "at page 29" in original.
+
+ibid. "at page 65" - "at page 73" in original.
+
+Index II. "Celandine" - "Calendine" in original.
+
+Ibid. "Thistle, ... 151." "151 note" in original.
+
+Ibid. "Thistle, Waste, 138" - "154" in original.
+
+Index III. "Fraxinus" - "Frarinus" in original.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Proserpina, Volume 1, by John  Ruskin
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