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}



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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!



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 impertinently, 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?

* * * * *

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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]



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.



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}

Ị 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.



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.