23. I am concerned, however, for the present, only with my first or golden order, of which the Roof-foil, or house-leek, is called in present botany, Sedum, 'the squatter,' because of its way of fastening itself down on stones, or roof, as close as it can sit. But I think this an ungraceful notion of its behaviour; and as its blossoms are, of all flowers, the most sharply and distinctly star-shaped, I shall call it 'Stella' (providing otherwise, in due time, for the poor little chickweeds;) and the common stonecrop will therefore be 'Stella domestica.'

The second tribe, (at present saxifraga,) growing for the most part wild on rocks, may, I trust, even in Protestant botany, be named Francesca, after St. Francis of Assisi; not only for its modesty, and love of mountain ground, and poverty of colour and leaf; but also because the chief element of its decoration, seen close, will be found in its spots, or stigmata.

In the nomenclature of the third order I make no change.

24. Now all this group of golden-blossoming plants agree in general character of having a rich cluster of radical leaves, from which they throw up a single stalk bearing clustered blossoms; for which stalk, when entirely leafless, I intend always to keep the term 'virgula,' the {147} 'little rod'—not painfully caring about it, but being able thus to define it with precision, if required. And these are connected with the stems of branching shrubs through infinite varieties of structure, in which the first steps of transition are made by carrying the cluster of radical leaves up, and letting them expire gradually from the rising stem: the changes of form in the leaves as they rise higher from the ground being one of quite the most interesting specific studies in every plant. I had set myself once, in a bye-study for foreground drawing, hard on this point; and began, with Mr. Burgess, a complete analysis of the foliation of annual stems; of which Line-studies II., III., and IV., are examples; reduced copies, all, from the beautiful Flora Danica. But after giving two whole lovely long summer days, under the Giesbach, to the blue scabious, ('Devil's bit,') and getting in that time, only half-way up it, I gave in; and must leave the work to happier and younger souls.

25. For these flowering stems, therefore, possessing nearly all the complex organization of a tree, but not its permanence, we will keep the word 'virga;' and 'virgula' for those that have no leaves. I believe, when we come to the study of leaf-order, it will be best to begin with these annual virgae, in which the leaf has nothing to do with preparation for a next year's branch. And now the remaining terms commonly applied to stems may be for the most part dispensed with; but several are interesting, and must be examined before dismissal. {148}

26. Indeed, in the first place, the word we have to use so often, 'stalk,' has not been got to the roots of, yet. It comes from the Greek [Greek: stelechos,] (stelechos,) the 'holding part' of a tree, that which is like a handle to all its branches; 'stock' is another form in which it has come down to us: with some notion of its being the mother of branches: thus, when Athena's olive was burnt by the Persians, two days after, a shoot a cubit long had sprung from the 'stelechos,' of it.

27. Secondly. Few words are more interesting to the modern scholarly and professorial mind than 'stipend.' (I have twice a year at present to consider whether I am worth mine, sent with compliments from the Curators of the University chest). Now, this word comes from 'stips,' small pay, which itself comes from 'stipo,' to press together, with the idea of small coin heaped up in little towers or piles. But with the idea of lateral pressing together, instead of downward, we get 'stipes,' a solid log; in Greek, with the same sense, [Greek: stupos,] (stupos,) whence, gradually, with help from another word meaning to beat, (and a side-glance at beating of hemp,) we get our 'stupid,' the German stumph, the Scottish sumph, and the plain English 'stump.'

Refining on the more delicate sound of stipes, the Latins got 'stipula,' the thin stem of straw: which rustles and ripples daintily in verse, associated with spica and spiculum, used of the sharp pointed ear of corn, and its fine processes of fairy shafts. {149}

28. There are yet two more names of stalk to be studied, though, except for particular plants, not needing to be used,—namely, the Latin cau-dex, and cau-lis, both connected with the Greek [Greek: kaulos], properly meaning a solid stalk like a handle, passing into the sense of the hilt of a sword, or quill of a pen. Then, in Latin, caudex passes into the sense of log, and so, of cut plank or tablet of wood; thus finally becoming the classical 'codex' of writings engraved on such wooden tablets, and therefore generally used for authoritative manuscripts.

Lastly, 'caulis,' retained accurately in our cauliflower, contracted in 'colewort,' and refined in 'kail,' softens itself into the French 'chou,' meaning properly the whole family of thick-stalked eatable salads with spreading heads; but these being distinguished explicitly by Pliny as 'Capitati,' 'salads with a head,' or 'Captain salads,' the mediaeval French softened the 'caulis capitatus' into 'chou cabus;'—or, to separate the round or apple-like mass of leaves from the flowery foam, 'cabus' simply, by us at last enriched and emphasized into 'cabbage.'

29. I believe we have now got through the stiffest piece of etymology we shall have to master in the course of our botany; but I am certain that young readers will find patient work, in this kind, well rewarded by the groups of connected thoughts which will thus attach themselves to familiar names; and their grasp of every language they learn must only be esteemed by them secure when they recognize its derivatives in these homely associations, {150} and are as much at ease with the Latin or French syllables of a word as with the English ones; this familiarity being above all things needful to cure our young students of their present ludicrous impression that what is simple, in English, is knowing, in Greek; and that terms constructed out of a dead language will explain difficulties which remained insoluble in a living one. But Greek is not yet dead: while if we carry our unscholarly nomenclature much further, English soon will be; and then doubtless botanical gentlemen at Athens will for some time think it fine to describe what we used to call caryophyllaceae, as the [Greek: hedlephides].

30. For indeed we are all of us yet but school-boys, clumsily using alike our lips and brains; and with all our mastery of instruments and patience of attention, but few have reached, and those dimly, the first level of science,—wonder.

For the first instinct of the stem,—unnamed by us yet—unthought of,—the instinct of seeking light, as of the root to seek darkness,—what words can enough speak the wonder of it.

Look. Here is the little thing, Line-study V. (A), in its first birth to us: the stem of stems; the one of which we pray that it may bear our daily bread. The seed has fallen in the ground with the springing germ of it downwards; with heavenly cunning the taught stem curls round, and seeks the never-seen light. Veritable 'conversion,' miraculous, called of God. And here is the oat {151} germ, (B)—after the wheat, most vital of divine gifts; and assuredly, in days to come, fated to grow on many a naked rock in hitherto lifeless lands, over which the glancing sheaves of it will shake sweet treasure of innocent gold.

And who shall tell us how they grow; and the fashion of their rustling pillars—bent, and again erect, at every breeze. Fluted shaft or clustered pier, how poor of art, beside this grass-shaft—built, first to sustain the food of men, then to be strewn under their feet!

We must not stay to think of it, yet, or we shall get no farther till harvest has come and gone again. And having our names of stems now determined enough, we must in next chapter try a little to understand the different kinds of them.

The following notes, among many kindly sent me on the subject of Scottish Heraldry, seem to be the most trustworthy:—

"The earliest known mention of the thistle as the national badge of Scotland is in the inventory of the effects of James III., who probably adopted it as an appropriate illustration of the royal motto, In defence.

"Thistles occur on the coins of James IV., Mary, James V., and James VI.; and on those of James VI. they are for the first time accompanied by the motto, Nemo me impune lacesset.

"A collar of thistles appears on the gold bonnet-pieces of James V. of 1539; and the royal ensigns, as depicted in Sir David Lindsay's armorial register of 1542, are surrounded by a collar formed entirely of golden thistles, with an oval badge attached. {152}

"This collar, however, was a mere device until the institution, or as it is generally but inaccurately called, the revival, of the order of the Thistle by James VII. (II. of England), which took place on May 29, 1687."

Date of James III.'s reign 1460-1488.

* * * * *

{153}

CHAPTER IX.

OUTSIDE AND IN.

1. The elementary study of methods of growth, given in the following chapter, has been many years written, (the greater part soon after the fourth volume of 'Modern Painters'); and ought now to be rewritten entirely; but having no time to do this, I leave it with only a word or two of modification, because some truth and clearness of incipient notion will be conveyed by it to young readers, from which I can afterwards lop the errors, and into which I can graft the finer facts, better than if I had a less blunt embryo to begin with.



2. A stem, then, broadly speaking, (I had thus began the old chapter,) is the channel of communication between the leaf and root; and if the leaf can grow directly from the root there is no stem: so that it is well first to conceive of all plants as consisting of leaves and roots only, with the condition that each leaf must have its own quite particular root[42] somewhere. {154} Let a b c, Fig. 16, be three leaves, each, as you see, with its own root, and by no means dependent on other leaves for its daily bread; and let the horizontal line be the surface of the ground. Then the plant has no stem, or an underground one. But if the three leaves rise above the ground, as in Fig. 17, they must reach their roots by elongating their stalks, and this elongation is the stem of the plant. If the outside leaves grow last, and are therefore youngest, the plant is said to grow from the outside. You know that 'ex' means out, and that 'gen' is the first syllable of Genesis (or creation), therefore the old botanists, putting an o between the two syllables, called plants whose outside leaves grew last, Ex-o-gens. If the inside leaf grows last, and is youngest, the plant was said to grow from the inside, and from the Greek Endon, within, called an 'Endo-gen.' If these names are persisted in, the Greek botanists, to return the compliment, will of course call Endogens [Greek: Inseidbornides], and Exogens [Greek: Houtseidbornides]. In the Oxford school, they will be called simply Inlaid and Outlaid.



3. You see that if the outside leaves are to grow last, they may conveniently grow two at a time; which they accordingly do, and exogens always start with two little {155} leaves from their roots, and may therefore conveniently be called two-leaved; which, if you please, we will for our parts call them. The botanists call them 'two-suckered,' and can't be content to call them that in English; but drag in a long Greek word, meaning the fleshy sucker of the sea-devil,—'cotyledon,' which, however, I find is practically getting shortened into 'cot,' and that they will have to end by calling endogens, monocots, and exogens, bicots. I mean steadily to call them one-leaved and two-leaved, for this further reason, that they differ not merely in the single or dual springing of first leaves from the seed; but in the distinctly single or dual arrangement of leaves afterwards on the stem; so that, through all the complexity obtained by alternate and spiral placing, every bicot or two-leaved flower or tree is in reality composed of dual groups of leaves, separated by a given length of stem; as, most characteristically in this pure mountain type of the Ragged Robin (Clarissa laciniosa), Fig. 18; and compare A, and B, Line-study II.; while, on the other hand, the monocot plants are by close analysis, I think, always resolvable into successively climbing leaves, sessile on one another, and sending their roots, {156} or processes, for nourishment, down through one another, as in Fig. 19.



4. Not that I am yet clear, at all, myself; but I do think it's more the botanists' fault than mine, what 'cotyledonous' structure there may be at the outer base of each successive bud; and still less, how the intervenient length of stem, in the bicots, is related to their power, or law, of branching. For not only the two-leaved tree is outlaid, and the one-leaved inlaid, but the two-leaved tree is branched, and the one-leaved tree is not branched. This is a most vital and important distinction, which I state to you in very bold terms, for though there are some apparent exceptions to the law, there are, I believe, no real ones, if we define a branch rightly. Thus, the head of a palm tree is merely a cluster of large leaves; and the spike of a grass, a clustered blossom. The stem, in both, is unbranched; and we should be able in this respect to classify plants very simply indeed, but for a provoking species of intermediate creatures whose branching is always in the manner of corals, or sponges, or arborescent minerals, irregular and accidental, and essentially, therefore, distinguished from the systematic anatomy of a truly branched tree. Of these presently; we must go on by very short steps: and I find no step can be taken without check from existing generalizations. Sowerby's definition of Monocotyledons, in his ninth volume, begins thus: "Herbs, (or rarely, and only in exotic genera,) trees, in which the wood, pith, and bark are indistinguishable." {157} Now if there be one plant more than another in which the pith is defined, it is the common Rush; while the nobler families of true herbs derive their principal character from being pithless altogether! We cannot advance too slowly.

5. In the families of one-leaved plants in which the young leaves grow directly out of the old ones, it becomes a grave question for them whether the old ones are to lie flat or edgeways, and whether they must therefore grow out of their faces or their edges. And we must at once understand the way they contrive it, in either case.



Among the many forms taken by the Arethusan leaf, one of the commonest is long and gradually tapering,—much broader at the base than the point. We will take such an one for examination, and suppose that it is growing on the ground as in Fig. 20, with a root to its every fibre. Cut out a piece of strong paper roughly into the shape of this Arethusan leaf, a, Fig. 21. Now suppose the next young leaf has to spring out of the front of this one, at about the middle of its height. Give it two nicks with the scissors at b b; then roll up the lower part into a cylinder, (it will overlap a good deal at the bottom,) and tie it fast with a fine thread: so, you will get the form at c. Then bend the top of it back, so that, seen sideways, it appears as at d, and you see you have made quite a little flower-pot to plant your {158} new leaf in, and perhaps it may occur to you that you have seen something like this before. Now make another, a little less wide, but with the part for the cylinder twice as long, roll it up in the same way, and slip it inside the other, with the flat part turned the other way, e. Surely this reminds you now of something you have seen? Or must I draw the something (Fig. 22)?



6. All grasses are thus constructed, and have their leaves set thus, opposite, on the sides of their tubular stems, alternately, as they ascend. But in most of them there is also a peculiar construction, by which, at the base of the sheath, or enclosing tube, each leaf articulates itself with the rest of the stem at a ringed knot, or joint. {159}



Before examining these, remember there are mainly two sorts of joints in the framework of the bodies of animals. One is that in which the bone is thick at the joints and thin between them, (see the bone of the next chicken leg you eat), the other is that of animals that have shells or horny coats, in which characteristically the shell is thin at the joints, and thick between them (look at the next lobster's claw you can see, without eating). You know, also, that though the crustaceous are titled only from their crusts, the name 'insect' is given to the whole insect tribe, because they are farther jointed almost into sections: it is easily remembered, also, that the projecting joint means strength and elasticity in the creature, and that all its limbs are useful to it, and cannot conveniently be parted with; and that the incised, sectional, or insectile joint means more or less weakness,[43] and necklace-like laxity or license in the creature's make; and an ignoble power of shaking off its legs or arms on occasion, coupled also with modes of growth involving occasionally quite astonishing transformations, and beginnings of new life under new circumstances; so that, until very lately, no mortal knew what a crab was like in its youth, the very existence {160} of the creature, as well as its legs, being jointed, as it were and made in separate pieces with the narrowest possible thread of connection between them; and its principal, or stomachic, period of life, connected with its sentimental period by as thin a thread as a wasp's stomach is with its thorax.

7. Now in plants, as in animals, there are just the same opposed aspects of joint, with this specialty of difference in function, that the animal's limb bends at the joints, but the vegetable limb stiffens. And when the articulation projects, as in the joint of a cane, it means not only that the strength of the plant is well carried through the junction, but is carried farther and more safely than it could be without it: a cane is stronger, and can stand higher than it could otherwise, because of its joints. Also, this structure implies that the plant has a will of its own, and a position which on the whole it will keep, however it may now and then be bent out of it; and that it has a continual battle, of a healthy and humanlike kind, to wage with surrounding elements.

But the crabby, or insect-like, joint, which you get in seaweeds and cacti, means either that the plant is to be dragged and wagged here and there at the will of waves, and to have no spring nor mind of its own; or else that it has at least no springy intention and elasticity of purpose, but only a knobby, knotty, prickly, malignant stubbornness, and incoherent opiniativeness; crawling about, and coggling, and grovelling, and aggregating {161} anyhow, like the minds of so many people whom one knows!

8. Returning then to our grasses, in which the real rooting and junction of the leaves with each other is at these joints; we find that therefore every leaf of grass may be thought of as consisting of two main parts, for which we shall want two separate names. The lowest part, which wraps itself round to become strong, we will call the 'staff,' and for the free-floating outer part we will take specially the name given at present carelessly to a large number of the plants themselves, 'flag.' This will give a more clear meaning to the words 'rod' (virga), and 'staff' (baculus), when they occur together, as in the 23rd Psalm; and remember the distinction is that a rod bends like a switch, but a staff is stiff. I keep the well-known name 'blade' for grass-leaves in their fresh green state.

9. You felt, as you were bending down the paper into the form d, Fig. 21, the difficulty and awkwardness of the transition from the tubular form of the staff to the flat one of the flag. The mode in which this change is effected is one of the most interesting features in plants, for you will find presently that the leaf-stalk in ordinary leaves is only a means of accomplishing the same change from round to flat. But you know I said just now that some leaves were not flat, but set upright, edgeways. It is not a common position in two-leaved trees; but if you can run out and look at an arbor vitae, it may interest you {162} to see its hatchet-shaped vertically crested cluster of leaves transforming themselves gradually downwards into branches; and in one-leaved trees the vertically edged group is of great importance.



10. Cut out another piece of paper like a in Fig. 21, but now, instead of merely giving it nicks at a, b, cut it into the shape A, Fig. 23. Roll the lower part up as before, but instead of pulling the upper part down, pinch its back at the dotted line, and bring the two points, a and b, forward, so that they may touch each other. B shows the look of the thing half-done, before the points a and b have quite met. Pinch them close, and stitch the two edges neatly together, all the way from a to the point c; then roll and tie up the lower part as before. You will find then that the back or spinal line of the whole leaf is bent forward, as at B. Now go out to the garden and gather the green leaf of a fleur-de-lys, and look at it and your piece of disciplined paper together; and I fancy you will probably find out several things for yourself that I want you to know.

11. You see, for one thing, at once, how strong the fleur-de-lys leaf is, and that it is just twice as strong as a blade of grass, for it is the substance of the staff, with its sides flattened together, while the grass blade is a staff cut {163} open and flattened out. And you see that as a grass blade necessarily flaps down, the fleur-de-lys leaf as necessarily curves up, owing to that inevitable bend in its back. And you see, with its keen edge, and long curve, and sharp point, how like a sword it is. The botanists would for once have given a really good and right name to the plants which have this kind of leaf, 'Ensatae,' from the Latin 'ensis,' a sword; if only sata had been properly formed from sis. We can't let the rude Latin stand, but you may remember that the fleur-de-lys, which is the flower of chivalry, has a sword for its leaf, and a lily for its heart.

12. In case you cannot gather a fleur-de-lys leaf, I have drawn for you, in Plate VI., a cluster of such leaves, which are as pretty as any, and so small that, missing the points of a few, I can draw them of their actual size. You see the pretty alternate interlacing at the bottom, and if you can draw at all, and will try to outline their curves, you will find what subtle lines they are. I did not know this name for the strong-edged grass leaves when I wrote the pieces about shield and sword leaves in 'Modern Painters'; I wish I had chanced in those passages on some other similitude, but I can't alter them now, and my trustful pupils may avoid all confusion of thought by putting gladius for ensis, and translating it by the word 'scymitar,' which is also more accurate in expressing the curvature blade. So we will call the ensatae, instead, 'gladiolae,' translating, 'scymitar-grasses.' And having {164} now got at some clear idea of the distinction between outlaid and inlaid growth in the stem, the reader will find the elementary analysis of forms resulting from outlaid growth in 'Modern Painters'; and I mean to republish it in the sequel of this book, but must go on to other matters here. The growth of the inlaid stem we will follow as far as we need, for English plants, in examining the glasses.

FLORENCE, 11th September, 1874.

As I correct this chapter for press, I find it is too imperfect to be let go without a word or two more. In the first place, I have not enough, in distinguishing the nature of the living yearly shoot, with its cluster of fresh leafage, from that of the accumulated mass of perennial trees, taken notice of the similar power even of the annual shoot, to obtain some manner of immortality for itself, or at least of usefulness, after death. A Tuscan woman stopped me on the path up to Fiesole last night, to beg me to buy her plaited straw. I wonder how long straw lasts, if one takes care of it? A Leghorn bonnet, (if now such things are,) carefully put away,—even properly taken care of when it is worn,—how long will it last, young ladies?

I have just been reading the fifth chapter of II. Esdras, and am fain to say, with less discomfort than otherwise I might have felt, (the example being set me by the archangel Uriel,) "I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know." How old is the oldest straw known? the oldest {165} linen? the oldest hemp? We have mummy wheat,—cloth of papyrus, which is a kind of straw. The paper reeds by the brooks, the flax-flower in the field, leave such imperishable frame behind them. And Ponte-della-Paglia, in Venice; and Straw Street, of Paris, remembered in Heaven,—there is no occasion to change their names, as one may have to change 'Waterloo Bridge,' or the 'Rue de l'Imperatrice.' Poor Empress! Had she but known that her true dominion was in the straw streets of her fields; not in the stone streets of her cities!

But think how wonderful this imperishableness of the stem of many plants is, even in their annual work: how much more in their perennial work! The noble stability between death and life, of a piece of perfect wood? It cannot grow, but will not decay; keeps record of its years of life, but surrenders them to become a constantly serviceable thing: which may be sailed in, on the sea, built with, on the land, carved by Donatello, painted on by Fra Angelico. And it is not the wood's fault, but the fault of Florence in not taking proper care of it, that the panel of Sandro Botticelli's loveliest picture has cracked, (not with heat, I believe, but blighting frost), a quarter of an inch wide through the Madonna's face.

But what is this strange state of undecaying wood? What sort of latent life has it, which it only finally parts with when it rots?

Nay, what is the law by which its natural life is measured? What makes a tree 'old'? One sees the {166} Spanish-chesnut trunks among the Apennines growing into caves, instead of logs. Vast hollows, confused among the recessed darknesses of the marble crags, surrounded by mere laths of living stem, each with its coronal of glorious green leaves. Why can't the tree go on, and on,—hollowing itself into a Fairy—no—a Dryad, Ring,—till it becomes a perfect Stonehenge of a tree? Truly, "I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know."

The worst of it is, however, that I don't know one thing which I ought very thoroughly to have known at least thirty years ago, namely, the true difference in the way of building the trunk in outlaid and inlaid wood. I have an idea that the stem of a palm-tree is only a heap of leaf-roots built up like a tower of bricks, year by year, and that the palm tree really grows on the top of it, like a bunch of fern; but I've no books here, and no time to read them if I had. If only I were a strong giant, instead of a thin old gentleman of fifty-five, how I should like to pull up one of those little palm-trees by the roots—(by the way, what are the roots of a palm like? and, how does it stand in sand, where it is wanted to stand, mostly? Fancy, not knowing that, at fifty-five!)—that grow all along the Riviera; and snap its stem in two, and cut it down the middle. But I suppose there are sections enough now in our grand botanical collections, and you can find it all out for yourself. That you should be able to ask a question clearly, is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered; and I think this chapter of mine will at {167} least enable you to ask some questions about the stem, though what a stem is, truly, "I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know."

KNARESBOROUGH, 30th April, 1876.

I see by the date of last paragraph that this chapter has been in my good Aylesbury printer's type for more than a year and a half. At this rate, Proserpina has a distant chance of being finished in the spirit-land, with more accurate information derived from the archangel Uriel himself, (not that he is likely to know much about the matter, if he keeps on letting himself be prevented from ever seeing foliage in spring-time by the black demon-winds,) about the year 2000. In the meantime, feeling that perhaps I am sent to tell my readers a little more than is above told, I have had recourse to my botanical friend, good Mr. Oliver of Kew, who has taught me, first, of palms, that they actually stitch themselves into the ground, with a long dipping loop, up and down, of the root fibres, concerning which sempstress-work I shall have a month's puzzlement before I can report on it; secondly, that all the increment of tree stem is, by division and multiplication of the cells of the wood, a process not in the least to be described as 'sending down roots from the leaf to the ground.' I suspected as much in beginning to revise this chapter; but hold to my judgment in not cancelling it. For this multiplication of the cells is at least compelled by an influence which passes from the leaf to the ground, and vice versa; and which is at present best {168} conceivable to me by imagining the continual and invisible descent of lightning from electric cloud by a conducting rod, endowed with the power of softly splitting the rod into two rods, each as thick as the original one. Studying microscopically, we should then see the molecules of copper, as we see the cells of the wood, dividing and increasing, each one of them into two. But the visible result, and mechanical conditions of growth, would still be the same as if the leaf actually sent down a new root fibre; and, more than this, the currents of accumulating substance, marked by the grain of the wood, are, I think, quite plainly and absolutely those of streams flowing only from the leaves downwards; never from the root up, nor of mere lateral increase. I must look over all my drawings again, and at tree stems again, with more separate study of the bark and pith in those museum sections, before I can assert this; but there will be no real difficulty in the investigation. If the increase of the wood is lateral only, the currents round the knots will be compressed at the sides, and open above and below; but if downwards, compressed above the knot and open below it. The nature of the force itself, and the manner of its ordinances in direction, remain, and must for ever remain, inscrutable as our own passions, in the hand of the God of all Spirits, and of all Flesh.

"Drunk is each ridge, of thy cup drinking, Each clod relenteth at thy dressing, {169} Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking, Fair spring sproutes forth, blest with thy blessing; The fertile year is with thy bounty crouned, And where thou go'st, thy goings fat the ground.

Plenty bedews the desert places, A hedge of mirth the hills encloseth. The fields with flockes have hid their faces, A robe of corn the valleys clotheth. Deserts and hills and fields and valleys all, Rejoice, shout, sing, and on thy name do call."

* * * * *

{170}

CHAPTER X.

THE BARK.

1. Philologists are continually collecting instances, like our friend the French critic of Virgil, of the beauty of finished language, or the origin of unfinished, in the imitation of natural sounds. But such collections give an entirely false idea of the real power of language, unless they are balanced by an opponent list of the words which signally fail of any such imitative virtue, and whose sound, if one dwelt upon it, is destructive of their meaning.

2. For instance. Few sounds are more distinct in their kind, or one would think more likely to be vocally reproduced in the word which signified them, than that of a swift rent in strongly woven cloth; and the English word 'rag' and ragged, with the Greek [Greek: rhegnumi], do indeed in a measure recall the tormenting effect upon the ear. But it is curious that the verb which is meant to express the actual origination of rags, should rhyme with two words entirely musical and peaceful—words, indeed, which I always reserve for final resource in passages which I want to be soothing as well as pretty,—'fair,' and {171} 'air;' while, in its orthography, it is identical with the word representing the bodily sign of tenderest passion, and grouped with a multitude of others,[44] in which the mere insertion of a consonant makes such wide difference of sentiment as between 'dear' and 'drear,' or 'pear' and 'spear.' The Greek root, on the other hand, has persisted in retaining some vestige of its excellent dissonance, even where it has parted with the last vestige of the idea it was meant to convey; and when Burns did his best,—and his best was above most men's—to gather pleasant liquid and labial syllabling, round gentle meaning, in

"Bonnie lassie, will ye go, Will ye go, will ye go, Bonnie lassie, will ye go, To the birks of Aberfeldy?"

he certainly had little thought that the delicately crisp final k, in birk, was the remnant of a magnificent Greek effort to express the rending of the earth by earthquake, in the wars of the giants. In the middle of that word 'esmaragēse,' we get our own beggar's 'rag' for a pure root, which afterwards, through the Latin frango, softens into our 'break,' and 'bark,'—the 'broken thing'; that idea of its rending around the tree's stem having been, in the very earliest human efforts at botanical description, {172} attached to it by the pure Aryan race, watching the strips of rosy satin break from the birch stems, in the Aberfeldys of Imaus.

3. That this tree should have been the only one which "the Aryans, coming as conquerors from the North, were able to recognize in Hindustan,"[45] and should therefore also be "the only one whose name is common to Sanskrit, and to the languages of Europe," delighted me greatly, for two reasons: the first, for its proof that in spite of the development of species, the sweet gleaming of birch stem has never changed its argent and sable for any unchequered heraldry; and the second, that it gave proof of a much more important fact, the keenly accurate observation of Aryan foresters at that early date; for the fact is that the breaking of the thin-beaten silver of the birch trunk is so delicate, and its smoothness so graceful, that until I painted it with care, I was not altogether clear-headed myself about the way in which the chequering was done: nor until Fors today brought me to the house of one of my father's friends at Carshalton, and gave me three birch stems to look at just outside the window, did I perceive it to be a primal question about them, what it is that blanches that dainty dress of theirs, or, anticipatorily, weaves. What difference is there between the making of the corky excrescence of other {173} trees, and of this almost transparent fine white linen? I perceive that the older it is, within limits, the finer and whiter; hoary tissue, instead of hoary hair—honouring the tree's aged body; the outer sprays have no silvery light on their youth. Does the membrane thin itself into whiteness merely by stretching, or produce an outer film of new substance?[46]

4. And secondly, this investiture, why is it transverse to the trunk,—swathing it, as it were, in bands? Above all,—when it breaks,—why does it break round the tree instead of down? All other bark breaks as anything would, naturally, round a swelling rod, but this, as if the stem were growing longer; until, indeed, it reaches farthest heroic old age, when the whiteness passes away again, and the rending is like that of other trees, downwards. So that, as it were in a changing language, we have the great botanical fact twice taught us, by this tree of Eden, that the skins of trees differ from the skins of the higher animals in that, for the most part, they won't stretch, and must be worn torn.

So that in fact the most popular arrangement of vegetative adult costume is Irish; a normal investiture in honourable rags; and decorousness of tattering, as of a banner borne in splendid ruin through storms of war.

5. Now therefore, if we think of it, we have five {174} distinct orders of investiture for organic creatures; first, mere secretion of mineral substance, chiefly lime, into a hard shell, which, if broken, can only be mended, like china—by sticking it together; secondly, organic substance of armour which grows into its proper shape at once for good and all, and can't be mended at all, if broken, (as of insects); thirdly, organic substance of skin, which stretches, as the creatures grows, by cracking, over a fresh skin which is supplied beneath it, as in bark of trees; fourthly, organic substance of skin cracked symmetrically into plates or scales which can increase all round their edges, and are connected by softer skin, below, as in fish and reptiles, (divided with exquisite lustre and flexibility, in feathers of birds); and lastly, true elastic skin, extended in soft unison with the creature's growth,—blushing with its blood, fading with its fear; breathing with its breath, and guarding its life with sentinel beneficence of pain.

6. It is notable, in this higher and lower range of organic beauty, that the decoration, by pattern and colour, which is almost universal in the protective coverings of the middle ranks of animals, should be reserved in vegetables for the most living part of them, the flower only; and that among animals, few but the malignant and senseless are permitted, in the corrugation of their armour, to resemble the half-dead trunk of the tree, as they float beside it in the tropical river. I must, however, leave the scale patterns of the palms and other inlaid tropical {175} stems for after-examination,—content, at present, with the general idea of the bark of an outlaid tree as the successive accumulation of the annual protecting film, rent into ravines of slowly increasing depth, and coloured, like the rock, whose stability it begins to emulate, with the grey or gold of clinging lichen and embroidering moss.

* * * * *

{176}

CHAPTER XI.

GENEALOGY.

1. Returning, after more than a year's sorrowful interval, to my Sicilian fields,—not incognisant, now, of some of the darker realms of Proserpina; and with feebler heart, and, it may be, feebler wits, for wandering in her brighter ones,—I find what I had written by way of sequel to the last chapter, somewhat difficult, and extremely tiresome. Not the less, after giving fair notice of the difficulty, and asking due pardon for the tiresomeness, I am minded to let it stand; trusting to end, with it, once for all, investigations of the kind. But in finishing this first volume of my School Botany, I must try to give the reader some notion of the plan of the book, as it now, during the time for thinking over it which illness left me, has got itself arranged in my mind, within limits of possible execution. And this the rather, because I wish also to state, somewhat more gravely than I have yet done, the grounds on which I venture here to reject many of the received names of plants; and to substitute others for them, relating to entirely different attributes {177} from those on which their present nomenclature is confusedly edified.

I have already in some measure given the reasons for this change;[47] but I feel that, for the sake of those among my scholars who have laboriously learned the accepted names, I ought now also to explain its method more completely.

2. I call the present system of nomenclature confusedly edified, because it introduces,—without, apparently, any consciousness of the inconsistency, and certainly with no apology for it,—names founded sometimes on the history of plants, sometimes on their qualities, sometimes on their forms, sometimes on their products, and sometimes on their poetical associations.

On their history—as 'Gentian' from King Gentius, and Funkia from Dr. Funk.

On their qualities—as 'Scrophularia' from its (quite uncertified) use in scrofula.

On their forms—as the 'Caryophylls' from having petals like husks of nuts.

On their products—as 'Cocos nucifera' from its nuts.

And on their poetical associations,—as the Star of Bethlehem from its imagined resemblance to the light of that seen by the Magi.

3. Now, this variety of grounds for nomenclature might patiently, and even with advantage, be permitted, {178} provided the grounds themselves were separately firm, and the inconsistency of method advisedly allowed, and, in each case, justified. If the histories of King Gentius and Dr. Funk are indeed important branches of human knowledge;—if the Scrophulariaceae do indeed cure King's Evil;—if pinks be best described in their likeness to nuts;—and the Star of Bethlehem verily remind us of Christ's Nativity,—by all means let these and other such names be evermore retained. But if Dr. Funk be not a person in any special manner needing either stellification or florification; if neither herb nor flower can avail, more than the touch of monarchs, against hereditary pain; if it be no better account of a pink to say it is nut-leaved, than of a nut to say it is pink-leaved; and if the modern mind, incurious respecting the journeys of wise men, has already confused, in its Bradshaw's Bible, the station of Bethlehem with that of Bethel,[48] it is certainly time to take some order with the partly false, partly useless, and partly forgotten literature of the Fields; and, before we bow our children's memories to the burden of it, ensure that there shall be matter worth carriage in the load.

4. And farther, in attempting such a change, we must be clear in our own minds whether we wish our nomenclature to tell us something about the plant itself, or only to tell us the place it holds in relation to other plants: as, for instance, in the Herb-Robert, would it be well to {179} christen it, shortly, 'Rob Roy,' because it is pre-eminently red, and so have done with it;—or rather to dwell on its family connections, and call it 'Macgregoraceous'?

5. Before we can wisely decide this point, we must resolve whether our botany is intended mainly to be useful to the vulgar, or satisfactory to the scientific elite. For if we give names characterizing individuals, the circle of plants which any country possesses may be easily made known to the children who live in it: but if we give names founded on the connexion between these and others at the Antipodes, the parish school-master will certainly have double work; and it may be doubted greatly whether the parish school-boy, at the end of the lecture, will have half as many ideas.

6. Nevertheless, when the features of any great order of plants are constant, and, on the whole, represented with great clearness both in cold and warm climates, it may be desirable to express this their citizenship of the world in definite nomenclature. But my own method, so far as hitherto developed, consists essentially in fastening the thoughts of the pupil on the special character of the plant, in the place where he is likely to see it; and therefore, in expressing the power of its race and order in the wider world, rather by reference to mythological associations than to botanical structure.

7. For instance, Plate VII. represents, of its real size, an ordinary spring flower in our English mountain fields. It is an average example,—not one of rare size under rare {180} conditions,—rather smaller than the average, indeed, that I might get it well into my plate. It is one of the flowers whose names I think good to change; but I look carefully through the existing titles belonging to it and its fellows, that I may keep all I expediently can. I find, in the first place, that Linnaeus called one group of its relations, Ophryds, from Ophrys,—Greek for the eyebrow,—on account of their resemblance to the brow of an animal frowning, or to the overshadowing casque of a helmet. I perceive this to be really a very general aspect of the flower; and therefore, no less than in respect to Linnaeus, I adopt this for the total name of the order, and call them 'Ophrydae,' or, shortly, 'Ophryds.'

8. Secondly: so far as I know these flowers myself, I perceive them to fall practically into three divisions,—one, growing in English meadows and Alpine pastures, and always adding to their beauty; another, growing in all sorts of places, very ugly itself, and adding to the ugliness of its indiscriminated haunts; and a third, growing mostly up in the air, with as little root as possible, and of gracefully fantastic forms, such as this kind of nativity and habitation might presuppose. For the present, I am satisfied to give names to these three groups only. There may be plenty of others which I do not know, and which other people may name, according to their knowledge. But in all these three kinds known to me, I perceive one constant characteristic to be some manner of distortion and I desire that fact,—marking a {181} spiritual (in my sense of the word) character of extreme mystery,—to be the first enforced on the mind of the young learner. It is exhibited to the English child, primarily, in the form of the stalk of each flower, attaching it to the central virga. This stalk is always twisted once and a half round, as if somebody had been trying to wring the blossom off; and the name of the family, in Proserpina, will therefore be 'Contorta'[49] in Latin, and 'Wreathe-wort' in English.

Farther: the beautiful power of the one I have drawn in its spring life, is in the opposition of its dark purple to the primrose in England, and the pale yellow anemone in the Alps. And its individual name will be, therefore, 'Contorta purpurea'—Purple Wreathe-wort.

And in drawing it, I take care to dwell on this strength of its color, and to show thoroughly that it is a dark blossom,[50] before I trouble myself about its minor characters.

9. The second group of this kind of flowers live, as I said, in all sorts of places; but mostly, I think, in disagreeable ones,—torn and irregular ground, under alternations of unwholesome heat and shade, and among swarms of nasty insects. I cannot yet venture on any bold general statement about them, but I think that is mostly their way; and at all events, they themselves are in the {182} habit of dressing in livid and unpleasant colors; and are distinguished from all other flowers by twisting, not only their stalks, but one of their petals, not once and a half only, but two or three times round, and putting it far out at the same time, as a foul jester would put out his tongue: while also the singular power of grotesque mimicry, which, though strong also in the other groups of their race, seems in the others more or less playful, is, in these, definitely degraded, and, in aspect, malicious.

10. Now I find the Latin name 'Satyrium' attached already to one sort of these flowers; and we cannot possibly have a better one for all of them. It is true that, in its first Greek form, Dioscorides attaches it to a white, not a livid, flower; and I dare say there are some white ones of the breed: but, in its full sense, the term is exactly right for the entire group of ugly blossoms of which the characteristic is the spiral curve and protraction of their central petal: and every other form of Satyric ugliness which I find among the Ophryds, whatever its color, will be grouped with them. And I make them central, because this humour runs through the whole order, and is, indeed, their distinguishing sign.

11. Then the third group, living actually in the air, and only holding fast by, without nourishing itself from, the ground, rock, or tree-trunk on which it is rooted, may of course most naturally and accurately be called 'Aeria,' as it has long been popularly known in English by the name of Air-plant. {183}

Thus we have one general name for all these creatures, 'Ophryd'; and three family or group names, Contorta, Satyrium, and Aeria,—every one of these titles containing as much accurate fact about the thing named as I can possibly get packed into their syllables: and I will trouble my young readers with no more divisions of the order. And if their parents, tutors, or governors, after this fair warning, choose to make them learn, instead, the seventy-seven different names with which botanist-heraldries have beautifully ennobled the family,—all I can say is, let them at least begin by learning them themselves. They will be found in due order in pages 1084, 1085 of Loudon's Cyclopaedia.[51]

12. But now, farther: the student will observe that the name of the total order is Greek; while the three family ones are Latin, although the central one is originally Greek also.

I adopt this as far as possible for a law through my whole plant nomenclature.

13. Farther: the terminations of the Latin family names will be, for the most part, of the masculine, {184} feminine, and neuter forms, us, a, um, with these following attached conditions.

(I.) Those terminating in 'us,' though often of feminine words, as the central Arbor, will indicate either real masculine strength (quereus, laurus), or conditions of dominant majesty (cedrus), of stubbornness and enduring force (crataegus), or of peasant-like commonalty and hardship (juncus); softened, as it may sometimes happen, into gentleness and beneficence (thymus). The occasional forms in 'er' and 'il' will have similar power (acer, basil).

(II.) Names with the feminine termination 'a,' if they are real names of girls, will always mean flowers that are perfectly pretty and perfectly good (Lucia, Viola, Margarita, Clarissa). Names terminating in 'a' which are not also accepted names of girls, may sometimes be none the less honourable, (Primula, Campanula,) but for the most part will signify either plants that are only good and worthy in a nursy sort of way, (Salvia,) or that are good without being pretty, (Lavandula,) or pretty without being good, (Kalmia). But no name terminating in 'a' will be attached to a plant that is neither good nor pretty.

(III.) The neuter names terminating in 'um' will always indicate some power either of active or suggestive evil, (Conium, Solanum, Satyrium,) or a relation, more or less definite, to death; but this relation to death may sometimes be noble, or pathetic,—"which {185} to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven,"—Lilium.

But the leading position of these neuters in the plant's double name must be noticed by students unacquainted with Latin, in order to distinguish them from plural genitives, which will always, of course, be the second word, (Francesca Fontium, Francesca of the Springs.)

14. Names terminating in 'is' and 'e,' if definitely names of women, (Iris, Amaryllis, Alcestis, Daphne,) will always signify flowers of great beauty, and noble historic association. If not definitely names of women, they will yet indicate some specialty of sensitiveness, or association with legend (Berberis, Clematis). No neuters in 'e' will be admitted.

15. Participial terminations (Impatiens), with neuters in 'en' (Cyclamen), will always be descriptive of some special quality or form,—leaving it indeterminate if good or bad, until explained. It will be manifestly impossible to limit either these neuters, or the feminines in 'is' to Latin forms; but we shall always know by their termination that they cannot be generic names, if we are strict in forming these last on a given method.

16. How little method there is in our present formation of them, I am myself more and more surprised as I consider. A child is shown a rose, and told that he is to call every flower like that, 'Rosaceous';[52] he is next {186} shown a lily, and told that he is to call every flower like that, 'Liliaceous';—so far well; but he is next shown a daisy, and is not at all allowed to call every flower like that, 'Daisaceous,' but he must call it, like the fifth order of architecture, 'Composite'; and being next shown a pink, he is not allowed to call other pinks 'Pinkaceous,' but 'Nut-leafed'; and being next shown a pease-blossom, he is not allowed to call other pease-blossoms 'Peasaceous,' but, in a brilliant burst of botanical imagination, he is incited to call it by two names instead of one, 'Butterfly-aceous' from its flower, and 'Pod-aceous' from its seed;—the inconsistency of the terms thus enforced upon him being perfected in their inaccuracy, for a daisy is not one whit more composite than Queen of the meadow, or Jura Jacinth;[53] and 'legumen' is not Latin for a pod, but 'siliqua,'—so that no good scholar could remember Virgil's 'siliqua quassante legumen,' without overthrowing all his Pisan nomenclature.

17. Farther. If we ground our names of the higher orders on the distinctive characters of form in plants, these are so many, and so subtle, that we are at once involved in more investigations than a young learner has ever time to follow successfully, and they must be at all times liable to dislocations and rearrangements on the discovery of any new link in the infinitely entangled {187} chain. But if we found our higher nomenclature at once on historic fact, and relative conditions of climate and character, rather than of form, we may at once distribute our flora into unalterable groups, to which we may add at our pleasure, but which will never need disturbance; far less, reconstruction.

18. For instance,—and to begin,—it is an historical fact that for many centuries the English nation believed that the Founder of its religion, spiritually, by the mouth of the King who spake of all herbs, had likened himself to two flowers,—the Rose of Sharon, and Lily of the Valley. The fact of this belief is one of the most important in the history of England,—that is to say, of the mind or heart of England: and it is connected solemnly with the heart of Italy also, by the closing cantos of the Paradiso.

I think it well therefore that our two first generic, or at least commandant, names heading the out-laid and in-laid divisions of plants, should be of the rose and lily, with such meaning in them as may remind us of this fact in the history of human mind.

It is also historical that the personal appearing of this Master of our religion was spoken of by our chief religious teacher in these terms: "The Grace of God, that bringeth salvation, hath appeared unto all men." And it is a constant fact that this 'grace' or 'favor' of God is spoken of as "giving us to eat of the Tree of Life."

19. Now, comparing the botanical facts I have to express, with these historical ones, I find that the rose tribe {188} has been formed among flowers, not in distant and monstrous geologic aeras, but in the human epoch;—that its 'grace' or favor has been in all countries so felt as to cause its acceptance everywhere for the most perfect physical type of womanhood;—and that the characteristic fruit of the tribe is so sweet, that it has become symbolic at once of the subtlest temptation, and the kindest ministry to the earthly passion of the human race. "Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love."

20. Therefore I shall call the entire order of these flowers 'Charites,' (Graces,) and they will be divided into these five genera, Rosa, Persica, Pomum, Rubra, and Fragaria. Which sequence of names I do not think the young learner will have difficulty in remembering; nor in understanding why I distinguish the central group by the fruit instead of the flower. And if he once clearly master the structure and relations of these five genera, he will have no difficulty in attaching to them, in a satellitic or subordinate manner, such inferior groups as that of the Silver-weed, or the Tormentilla; but all he will have to learn by heart and rote, will be these six names; the Greek Master-name, Charites, and the five generic names, in each case belonging to plants, as he will soon find, of extreme personal interest to him.

21. I have used the word 'Order' as the name of our widest groups, in preference to 'Class,' because these widest groups will not always include flowers like each other in form, or equal to each other in vegetative rank; {189} but they will be 'Orders,' literally like those of any religious or chivalric association, having some common link rather intellectual than national,—the Charites, for instance, linked by their kindness,—the Oreiades, by their mountain seclusion, as Sisters of Charity or Monks of the Chartreuse, irrespective of ties of relationship. Then beneath these orders will come, what may be rightly called, either as above in Greek derivation, 'Genera,' or in Latin, 'Gentes,' for which, however, I choose the Latin word, because Genus is disagreeably liable to be confused on the ear with 'genius'; but Gens, never; and also 'nomen gentile' is a clearer and better expression than 'nomen generosum,' and I will not coin the barbarous one, 'genericum.' The name of the Gens, (as 'Lucia,') with an attached epithet, as 'Verna,' will, in most cases, be enough to characterize the individual flower; but if farther subdivision be necessary, the third order will be that of Families, indicated by a 'nomen familiare' added in the third place of nomenclature, as Lucia Verna,—Borealis; and no farther subdivision will ever be admitted. I avoid the word 'species'—originally a bad one, and lately vulgarized beyond endurance—altogether. And varieties belonging to narrow localities, or induced by horticulture, may be named as they please by the people living near the spot, or by the gardener who grows them; but will not be acknowledged by Proserpina. Nevertheless, the arbitrary reduction under Ordines, Gentes, and Familiae, {190} is always to be remembered as one of massive practical convenience only; and the more subtle arborescence of the infinitely varying structures may be followed, like a human genealogy, as far as we please, afterwards; when once we have got our common plants clearly arranged and intelligibly named.

22. But now we find ourselves in the presence of a new difficulty, the greatest we have to deal with in the whole matter.

One new nomenclature, to be thoroughly good, must be acceptable to scholars in the five great languages, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English; and it must be acceptable by them in teaching the native children of each country. I shall not be satisfied, unless I can feel that the little maids who gather their first violets under the Acropolis rock, may receive for them AEschylean words again with joy. I shall not be content, unless the mothers watching their children at play in the Ceramicus of Paris, under the scarred ruins of her Kings' palace, may yet teach them there to know the flowers which the Maid of Orleans gathered at Domremy. I shall not be satisfied unless every word I ask from the lips of the children of Florence and Rome, may enable them better to praise the flowers that are chosen by the hand of Matilda,[54] and bloom around the tomb of Virgil.

{191}

23. Now in this first example of nomenclature, the Master-name, being pure Greek, may easily be accepted by Greek children, remembering that certain also of their own poets, if they did not call the flower a Grace itself, at least thought of it as giving gladness to the Three in their dances.[55] But for French children the word 'Grace' has been doubly and trebly corrupted; first, by entirely false theological scholarship, mistaking the 'Favor' or Grace done by God to good men, for the 'Misericordia,' or mercy, shown by Him to bad ones; and so, in practical life, finally substituting 'Grace' as a word of extreme and mortal prayer, for 'Merci,' and of late using 'Merci' in a totally ridiculous and perverted power, for the giving of thanks (or refusal of offered good): while the literally derived word 'Charite' has become, in the modern mind, a gift, whether from God or man, only to the wretched, never to the happy: and lastly, 'Grace' in its physical sense has been perverted, by their social vulgarity, into an idea, whether with respect to form or motion, commending itself rather to the ballet-master than either to the painter or the priest.

For these reasons, the Master name of this family, for my French pupils, must be simply 'Rhodiades,' which will bring, for them, the entire group of names into easily remembered symmetry; and the English form of {192} the same name, Rhodiad, is to be used by English scholars also for all tribes of this group except the five principal ones.

24. Farther, in every gens of plants, one will be chosen as the representative, which, if any, will be that examined and described in the course of this work, if I have opportunity of doing so.

This representative flower will always be a wild one, and of the simplest form which completely expresses the character of the plant; existing divinely and unchangeably from age to age, ungrieved by man's neglect, and inflexible by his power.

And this divine character will be expressed by the epithet 'Sacred,' taking the sense in which we attach it to a dominant and christened majesty, when it belongs to the central type of any forceful order;—'Quercus sacra,' 'Laurus sacra,' etc.,—the word 'Benedicta,' or 'Benedictus,' being used instead, if the plant be too humble to bear, without some discrepancy and unbecomingness, the higher title; as 'Carduus Benedictus,' Holy Thistle.

25. Among the gentes of flowers bearing girls' names, the dominant one will be simply called the Queen, 'Rose Regina,' 'Rose the Queen' (the English wild rose); 'Clarissa Regina,' 'Clarissa the Queen' (Mountain Pink); 'Lucia Regina,' 'Lucy the Queen' (Spring Gentian), or in simpler English, 'Lucy of Teesdale,' as 'Harry of Monmouth.' The ruling flowers of groups {193} which bear names not yet accepted for names of girls, will be called simply 'Domina,' or shortly 'Donna.' 'Rubra domina' (wild raspberry): the wild strawberry, because of her use in heraldry, will bear a name of her own, exceptional, 'Cora coronalis.'

26. These main points being understood, and concessions made, we may first arrange the greater orders of land plants in a group of twelve, easily remembered, and with very little forcing. There must be some forcing always to get things into quite easily tenable form, for Nature always has her ins and outs. But it is curious how fitly and frequently the number of twelve may be used for memoria technica; and in this instance the Greek derivative names fall at once into harmony with the most beautiful parts of Greek mythology, leading on to early Christian tradition.

27. Their series will be, therefore, as follows: the principal subordinate groups being at once placed under each of the great ones. The reasons for occasional appearance of inconsistency will be afterwards explained, and the English and French forms given in each case are the terms which would be used in answering the rapid question, 'Of what order is this flower?' the answer being, It is a 'Cyllenid,' a 'Pleiad,' or a 'Vestal,' as one would answer of a person, he is a Knight of St. John or Monk of St. Benedict; while to the question, of what gens, we answer, a Stella or an Erica, as one would answer of a person, a Stuart or Plantagenet. {194}

I. CHARITES. ENG. CHARIS. FR. RHODIADE. Rosa. Persica. Pomum. Rubra. Fragaria.

II. URANIDES. ENG. URANID. FR. URANIDE. Lucia. Campanula. Convoluta.

III. CYLLENIDES. ENG. CYLLENID. FR. NEPHELIDE. Stella. Francesca. Primula.

IV. OREIADES. ENG. OREIAD. FR. OREADE. Erica. Myrtilla. Aurora.

V. PLEIADES. ENG. PLEIAD. FR. PLEIADE. Silvia. Anemone.

VI. ARTEMIDES. ENG. ARTEMID. FR. ARTEMIDE. Clarissa. Lychnis. Scintilla. Mica.

VII. VESTALES. ENG. VESTAL. FR. VESTALE. Mentha. Melitta. Basil. Salvia. Lavandula. Thymus.

VIII. CYTHERIDES. ENG. CYTHERID. FR. CYTHERIDE. Viola. Veronica. Giulietta. {195}

IX. HELIADES. ENG. ALCESTID. FR. HELIADE. Clytia. Margarita. Alcestis. Falconia. Carduus.

X. DELPHIDES. ENG. DELPHID. FR. DELPHIDE. Laurus. Granata. Myrtus.

XI. HESPERIDES. ENG. HESPERID. FR. HESPERIDE. Aurantia. Aglee.

XII. ATHENAIDES. ENG. ATHENAID. FR. ATHENAIDE. Olea. Fraxinus.

I will shortly note the changes of name in their twelve orders, and the reasons for them.

I. CHARITES.—The only change made in the nomenclature of this order is the slight one of 'rubra' for 'rubus': partly to express true sisterhood with the other Charites; partly to enforce the idea of redness, as characteristic of the race, both in the lovely purple and russet of their winter leafage, and in the exquisite bloom of scarlet on the stems in strong young shoots. They have every right to be placed among the Charites, first because the raspberry is really a more important fruit in domestic economy than the strawberry; and, secondly, because the wild bramble is often in its wandering sprays even more graceful than the rose; and in blossom and {196} fruit the best autumnal gift that English Nature has appointed for her village children.

II. URANIDES.—Not merely because they are all of the color of the sky, but also sacred to Urania in their divine purity. 'Convoluta' instead of 'convolvulus,' chiefly for the sake of euphony; but also because pervinca is to be included in this group.

III. CYLLENIDES.—Named from Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, because the three races included in the order alike delight in rocky ground, and in the cold or moist air of mountain-clouds.

IV. OREIADES.—Described in next chapter.

V. PLEIADES.—From the habit of the flowers belonging to this order to get into bright local clusters. Silvia, for the wood-sorrel, will I hope be an acceptable change to my girl-readers.

VI. ARTEMIDES.—Dedicate to Artemis for their expression of energy, no less than purity. This character was rightly felt in them by whoever gave the name 'Dianthus' to their leading race; a name which I should have retained if it had not been bad Greek. I wish them, by their name 'Clarissa' to recall the memory of St. Clare, as 'Francesca' that of St. Francis.[56] The {197} 'issa,' not without honour to the greatest of our English moral story-tellers, is added for the practical reason, that I think the sound will fasten in the minds of children the essential characteristic of the race, the cutting of the outer edge of the petal as if with scissors.

VII. VESTALES.—I allow this Latin form, because Hestiades would have been confused with Heliades. The order is named 'of the hearth,' from its manifold domestic use, and modest blossoming.

VIII. CYTHERIDES.—Dedicate to Venus, but in all purity and peace of thought. Giulietta, for the coarse, and more than ordinarily false, Polygala.

IX. HELIADES.—The sun-flowers.[57] In English, Alcestid, in honour to Chaucer and the Daisy.

X. DELPHIDES.—Sacred to Apollo. Granata, changed from Punica, in honor to Granada and the Moors.

XI. HESPERIDES.—Already a name given to the order. {198} Aegle, prettier and more classic than Limonia, includes the idea of brightness in the blossom.

XII. ATHENAIDES.—I take Fraxinus into this group, because the mountain ash, in its hawthorn-scented flower, scarletest of berries, and exquisitely formed and finished leafage, belongs wholly to the floral decoration of our native rocks, and is associated with their human interests, though lightly, not less spiritually, than the olive with the mind of Greece.

28. The remaining groups are in great part natural; but I separate for subsequent study five orders of supreme domestic utility, the Mallows, Currants, Pease,[58] Cresses, and Cranesbills, from those which, either in fruit or blossom, are for finer pleasure or higher beauty. I think it will be generally interesting for children to learn those five names as an easy lesson, and gradually discover, wondering, the world that they include. I will give their terminology at length, separately.

29. One cannot, in all groups, have all the divisions of equal importance; the Mallows are only placed with the other four for their great value in decoration of cottage gardens in autumn: and their softly healing {199} qualities as a tribe. They will mentally connect the whole useful group with the three great AEsculapiadae, Cinchona, Coffea, and Camellia.

30. Taking next the water-plants, crowned in the DROSIDAE, which include the five great families, Juncus, Jacinthus, Amaryllis, Iris, and Lilium, and are masculine in their Greek name because their two first groups, Juncus and Jacinthus, are masculine, I gather together the three orders of TRITONIDES, which are notably trefoil; the NAIADES, notably quatrefoil, but for which I keep their present pretty name; and the BATRACHIDES,[59] notably cinqfoil, for which I keep their present ugly one, only changing it from Latin into Greek.

31. I am not sure of being forgiven so readily for putting the Grasses, Sedges, Mosses, and Lichens together, under the great general head of Demetridae. But it seems to me the mosses and lichens belong no less definitely to Demeter, in being the first gatherers of earth on rock, and the first coverers of its sterile surface, than the grass which at last prepares it to the foot and to the food of man. And with the mosses I shall take all the especially moss-plants which otherwise are homeless or companionless, Drosera, and the like, and as a connecting link with the flowers belonging to the Dark {200} Kora, the two strange orders of the Ophryds and Agarics.

32. Lastly will come the orders of flowers which may be thought of as belonging for the most part to the Dark Kora of the lower world,—having at least the power of death, if not its terror, given them, together with offices of comfort and healing in sleep, or of strengthening, if not too prolonged, action on the nervous power of life. Of these, the first will be the DIONYSIDAE,—Hedera, Vitis, Liana; then the DRACONIDAE,—Atropa, Digitalis, Linaria; and, lastly, the MOIRIDAE,—Conium, Papaver, Solanum, Arum, and Nerium.

33. As I see this scheme now drawn out, simple as it is, the scope of it seems not only far too great for adequate completion by my own labour, but larger than the time likely to be given to botany by average scholars would enable them intelligently to grasp: and yet it includes, I suppose, not the tenth part of the varieties of plants respecting which, in competitive examination, a student of physical science is now expected to know, or at least assert on hearsay, something.

So far as I have influence with the young, myself, I would pray them to be assured that it is better to know the habits of one plant than the names of a thousand; and wiser to be happily familiar with those that grow in the nearest field, than arduously cognisant of all that plume the isles of the Pacific, or illumine the Mountains of the Moon. {201}

Nevertheless, I believe that when once the general form of this system in Proserpina has been well learned, much other knowledge may be easily attached to it, or sheltered under the eaves of it: and in its own development, I believe everything may be included that the student will find useful, or may wisely desire to investigate, of properly European botany. But I am convinced that the best results of his study will be reached by a resolved adherence to extreme simplicity of primal idea, and primal nomenclature.

34. I do not think the need of revisal of our present scientific classification could be more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that laurels and roses are confused, even by Dr. Lindley, in the mind of his feminine readers; the English word laurel, in the index to his first volume of Ladies' Botany, referring them to the cherries, under which the common laurel is placed as 'Prunus Laurocerasus,' while the true laurel, 'Laurus nobilis,' must be found in the index of the second volume, under the Latin form 'Laurus.'

This accident, however, illustrates another, and a most important point to be remembered, in all arrangements whether of plants, minerals, or animals. No single classification can possibly be perfect, or anything like perfect. It must be, at its best, a ground, or warp of arrangement only, through which, or over which, the cross threads of another,—yes, and of many others,—must be woven in our minds. Thus the almond, though in {202} the form and colour of its flower, and method of its fruit, rightly associated with the roses, yet by the richness and sweetness of its kernel must be held mentally connected with all plants that bear nuts. These assuredly must have something in their structure common, justifying their being gathered into a conceived or conceivable group of 'Nuciferae,' in which the almond, hazel, walnut, cocoa-nut, and such others would be considered as having relationship, at least in their power of secreting a crisp and sweet substance which is not wood, nor bark, nor pulp, nor seed-pabulum reducible to softness by boiling;—but quite separate substance, for which I do not know that there at present exists any botanical name,—of which, hitherto, I find no general account, and can only myself give so much, on reflection, as that it is crisp and close in texture, and always contains some kind of oil or milk.

35. Again, suppose the arrangement of plants could, with respect to their flowers and fruits, be made approximately complete, they must instantly be broken and reformed by comparison of their stems and leaves. The three creeping families of the Charites,—Rosa, Rubra, and Fragaria,—must then be frankly separated from the elastic Persica and knotty Pomum; of which one wild and lovely species, the hawthorn, is no less notable for the massive accumulation of wood in the stubborn stem of it, than the wild rose for her lovely power of wreathing her garlands at pleasure wherever they are {203} fairest, the stem following them and sustaining, where they will.

36. Thus, as we examine successively each part of any plant, new sisterhoods, and unthought-of fellowships, will be found between the most distant orders; and ravines of unexpected separation open between those otherwise closely allied. Few botanical characters are more definite than the leaf structure illustrated in Plate VI., which has given to one group of the Drosidae the descriptive name of Ensatae, (see above, Chapter IX., Sec. 11,) but this conformation would not be wisely permitted to interfere in the least with the arrangement founded on the much more decisive floral aspects of the Iris and Lily. So, in the fifth volume of 'Modern Painters,' the sword-like, or rather rapier-like, leaves of the pine are opposed, for the sake of more vivid realization, to the shield-like leaves of the greater number of inland trees; but it would be absurd to allow this difference any share in botanical arrangement,—else we should find ourselves thrown into sudden discomfiture by the wide-waving and opening foliage of the palms and ferns.

37. But through all the defeats by which insolent endeavors to sum the orders of Creation must be reproved, and in the midst of the successes by which patient insight will be surprised, the fact of the confirmation of species in plants and animals must remain always a miraculous one. What outstretched sign of constant Omnipotence can be more awful, than that the susceptibility to {204} external influences, with the reciprocal power of transformation, in the organs of the plant; and the infinite powers of moral training and mental conception over the nativity of animals, should be so restrained within impassable limits, and by inconceivable laws, that from generation to generation, under all the clouds and revolutions of heaven with its stars, and among all the calamities and convulsions of the Earth with her passions, the numbers and the names of her Kindred may still be counted for her in unfailing truth;—still the fifth sweet leaf unfold for the Rose, and the sixth spring for the Lily; and yet the wolf rave tameless round the folds of the pastoral mountains, and yet the tiger flame through the forests of the night.

* * * * *

{205}

CHAPTER XII.

CORA AND KRONOS.

1. Of all the lovely wild plants—and few, mountain-bred, in Britain, are other than lovely,—that fill the clefts and crest the ridges of my Brantwood rock, the dearest to me, by far, are the clusters of whortleberry which divide possession of the lower slopes with the wood hyacinth and pervenche. They are personally and specially dear to me for their association in my mind with the woods of Montanvert; but the plant itself, irrespective of all accidental feeling, is indeed so beautiful in all its ways—so delicately strong in the spring of its leafage, so modestly wonderful in the formation of its fruit, and so pure in choice of its haunts, not capriciously or unfamiliarly, but growing in luxuriance through all the healthiest and sweetest seclusion of mountain territory throughout Europe,—that I think I may without any sharp remonstrance be permitted to express for this once only, personal feeling in my nomenclature, calling it in Latin 'Myrtilla Cara,' and in French 'Myrtille Cherie,' but retaining for it in English its simply classic name, 'Blue Whortle.' {206}

2. It is the most common representative of the group of Myrtillae, which, on reference to our classification, will be found central between the Ericae and Aurorae. The distinctions between these three families may be easily remembered, and had better be learned before going farther; but first let us note their fellowship. They are all Oreiades, mountain plants; in specialty, they are all strong in stem, low in stature, and the Ericae and Aurorae glorious in the flush of their infinitely exulting flowers, ("the rapture of the heath"—above spoken of, p. 96.) But all the essential loveliness of the Myrtillae is in their leaves and fruit: the first always exquisitely finished and grouped like the most precious decorative work of sacred painting; the second, red or purple, like beads of coral or amethyst. Their minute flowers have rarely any general part or power in the colors of mountain ground; but, examined closely, they are one of the chief joys of the traveller's rest among the Alps; and full of exquisiteness unspeakable, in their several bearings and miens of blossom, so to speak. Plate VIII. represents, however feebly, the proud bending back of her head by Myrtilla Regina:[60] an action as beautiful in her as it is terrible in the Kingly Serpent of Egypt.

3. The formal differences between these three families are trenchant and easily remembered. The Ericae {207} are all quatrefoils, and quatrefoils of the most studied and accomplished symmetry; and they bear no berries, but only dry seeds. The Myrtillae and Aurorae are both Cinqfoil; but the Myrtillae are symmetrical in their blossom, and the Aurorae unsymmetrical. Farther, the Myrtillae are not absolutely determinate in the number of their foils, (this being essentially a characteristic of flowers exposed to much hardship,) and are thus sometimes quatrefoil, in sympathy with the Ericae. But the Aurorae are strictly cinqfoil. These last are the only European form of a larger group, well named 'Azalea' from the Greek [Greek: aza], dryness, and its adjective [Greek: azalea], dry or parched; and this name must be kept for the world-wide group, (including under it Rhododendron, but not Kalmia,) because there is an under-meaning in the word Aza, enabling it to be applied to the substance of dry earth, and indicating one of the great functions of the Oreiades, in common with the mosses,—the collection of earth upon rocks.

4. Neither the Ericae, as I have just said, nor Aurorae bear useful fruit; and the Ericae are named from their consequent worthlessness in the eyes of the Greek farmer; they were the plants he 'tore up' for his bed, or signal-fire, his word for them including a farther sense of crushing or bruising into a heap. The Westmoreland shepherds now, alas! burn them remorselessly on the ground, (and a year since had nearly set the copse of Brantwood on fire just above the house.) The sense of {208} parched and fruitless existence is given to the heaths, with beautiful application of the context, in our English translation of Jeremiah xvii. 6; but I find the plant there named is, in the Septuagint, Wild Tamarisk; the mountains of Palestine being, I suppose, in that latitude, too low for heath, unless in the Lebanon.

5. But I have drawn the reader's thoughts to this great race of the Oreiades at present, because they place for us in the clearest light a question which I have finally to answer before closing the first volume of Proserpina; namely, what is the real difference between the three ranks of Vegetative Humility, and Noblesse—the Herb, the Shrub, and the Tree?

6. Between the herb, which perishes annually, and the plants which construct year after year an increasing stem, there is, of course, no difficulty of discernment; but between the plants which, like these Oreiades, construct for themselves richest intricacy of supporting stem, yet scarcely rise a fathom's height above the earth they gather and adorn,—between these, and the trees that lift cathedral aisles of colossal shade on Andes and Lebanon,—where is the limit of kind to be truly set?

7. We have the three orders given, as no botanist could, in twelve lines by Milton:—

"Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flow'r'd Op'ning their various colours, and made gay Her bosom smelling sweet; and, these scarce blown, Forth flourish'd thick the clust'ring vine, forth crept {209} The swelling gourd, up stood the corny reed Embattel'd in her field; and th' humble shrub, And bush with frizzled hair implicit: last Rose, as in dance, the stately trees, and spread Their branches hung with copious fruits, or gemm'd Their blossoms; with high woods the hills were crown'd; With tufts the valleys and each fountain side; With borders long the rivers."

Only to learn, and be made to understand, these twelve lines thoroughly would teach a youth more of true botany than an entire Cyclopaedia of modern nomenclature and description: they are, like all Milton's work, perfect in accuracy of epithet, while consummate in concentration. Exquisite in touch, as infinite in breadth, they gather into their unbroken clause of melodious compass the conception at once of the Columbian prairie, the English cornfield, the Syrian vineyard, and the Indian grove. But even Milton has left untold, and for the instant perhaps unthought of, the most solemn difference of rank between the low and lofty trees, not in magnitude only, nor in grace, but in duration.

8. Yet let us pause before passing to this greater subject, to dwell more closely on what he has told us so clearly,—the difference in Grace, namely, between the trees that rise 'as in dance,' and 'the bush with frizzled hair.' For the bush form is essentially one taken by vegetation in some kind of distress; scorched by heat, discouraged by darkness, or bitten by frost; it is the form in which isolated knots of earnest plant life stay {210} the flux of fiery sands, bind the rents of tottering crags, purge the stagnant air of cave or chasm, and fringe with sudden hues of unhoped spring the Arctic edge of retreating desolation.

On the other hand, the trees which, as in sacred dance, make the borders of the rivers glad with their procession, and the mountain ridges statelier with their pride, are all expressions of the vegetative power in its accomplished felicities; gathering themselves into graceful companionship with the fairest arts and serenest life of man; and providing not only the sustenance and the instruments, but also the lessons and the delights, of that life, in perfectness of order, and unblighted fruition of season and time.

9. 'Interitura'—yet these not to-day, nor to-morrow, nor with the decline of the summer's sun. We describe a plant as small or great; and think we have given account enough of its nature and being. But the chief question for the plant, as for the human creature, is the Number of its days; for to the tree, as to its master, the words are forever true—"As thy Day is, so shall thy Strength be."

10. I am astonished hourly, more and more, at the apathy and stupidity which have prevented me hitherto from learning the most simple facts at the base of this question! Here is this myrtille bush in my hand—its cluster of some fifteen or twenty delicate green branches knitting themselves downwards into the stubborn brown {211} of a stem on which my knife makes little impression. I have not the slightest idea how old it is, still less how old it might one day have been if I had not gathered it; and, less than the least, what hinders it from becoming as old as it likes! What doom is there over these bright green sprays, that they may never win to any height or space of verdure, nor persist beyond their narrow scope of years?

11. And the more I think the more I bewilder myself; for these bushes, which are pruned and clipped by the deathless Gardener into these lowly thickets of bloom, do not strew the ground with fallen branches and faded clippings in any wise,—it is the pining umbrage of the patriarchal trees that tinges the ground and betrays the foot beneath them: but, under the heather and the Alpine rose.—Well, what is under them, then? I never saw, nor thought of looking,—will look presently under my own bosquets and beds of lingering heather-blossom: beds indeed they were only a month since, a foot deep in flowers, and close in tufted cushions, and the mountain air that floated over them rich in honey like a draught of metheglin.

12. Not clipped, nor pruned, I think, after all,—nor dwarfed in the gardener's sense; but pausing in perpetual youth and strength, ordained out of their lips of roseate infancy. Rose-trees—the botanists have falsely called the proudest of them; yet not trees in any wise, they, nor doomed to know the edge of axe at their {212} roots, nor the hoary waste of time, or searing thunderstroke, on sapless branches. Continual morning for them, and in them; they themselves an Aurora, purple and cloudless, stayed on all the happy hills. That shall be our name for them, in the flushed Phoenician colour of their height, in calm or tempest of the heavenly sea; how much holier than the depth of the Tyrian! And the queen of them on our own Alps shall be 'Aurora Alpium.'[61]

13. There is one word in the Miltonian painting of them which I must lean on specially; for the accurate English of it hides deep morality no less than botany. 'With hair implicit.' The interweaving of complex band, which knits the masses of heath or of Alpine rose into their dense tufts and spheres of flower, is to be noted both in these, and in stem structure of a higher order like that of the stone pine, for an expression of the instinct of the plant gathering itself into protective unity, whether against cold or heat, while the forms of the trees which have no hardship to sustain are uniformly based on the effort of each spray to separate itself from its fellows to the utmost, and obtain around its own leaves the utmost space of air.

In vulgar modern English, the term 'implicit' used of Trust or Faith, has come to signify only its serenity. But the Miltonian word gives the reason of serenity: {213} the root and branch intricacy of closest knowledge and fellowship.

14. I have said that Milton has told us more in these few lines than any botanist could. I will prove my saying by placing in comparison with them two passages of description by the most imaginative and generally well-trained scientific man since Linnaeus—Humboldt—which, containing much that is at this moment of special use to us, are curious also in the confusion even of the two orders of annual and perennial plants, and show, therefore, the extreme need of most careful initial work in this distinction of the reign of Cora from that of Kronos.

"The disk of the setting sun appeared like a globe of fire suspended over the savannah; and its last rays, as they swept the earth, illumined the extremities of the grass, strongly agitated by the evening breeze. In the low and humid places of the equinoxial zone, even when the gramineous plants and reeds present the aspect of a meadow, of turf, a rich decoration of the picture is usually wanting. I mean that variety of wild flowers which, scarcely rising above the grass, seem to lie upon a smooth bed of verdure. Between the tropics, the strength and luxury of vegetation give such a development to plants, that the smallest of the dicotyledonous family become shrubs.[62] It would seem as if the {214} liliaceous plants, mingled with the gramina, assumed the place of the flowers of our meadows. Their form is indeed striking; they dazzle by the variety and splendor of their colours; but, too high above the soil, they disturb that harmonious relation which exists among the plants that compose our meadows and our turf. Nature, in her beneficence, has given the landscape under every zone its peculiar type of beauty.

"After proceeding four hours across the savannahs, we entered into a little wood composed of shrubs and small trees, which is called El Pejual; no doubt because of the great abundance of the 'Pejoa' (Gaultheria odorata,) a plant with very odoriferous leaves. The steepness of the mountain became less considerable, and we felt an indescribable pleasure in examining the plants of this region. Nowhere, perhaps, can be found collected together in so small a space of ground, productions so beautiful, and so remarkable in regard to the geography of plants. At the height of a thousand toises, the lofty savannahs of the hills terminate in a zone of shrubs, which by their appearance, their tortuous branches, their stiff leaves, and the dimensions and beauty of their purple flowers, remind us of what is called in the Cordilleras of the Andes the vegetation of the paramos[63] and the punas. We find there the {215} family of the Alpine rhododendrons, the thibaudias, the andromedas, the vacciniums, and those befarias[64] with resinous leaves, which we have several times compared to the rhododendron of our European Alps.

"Even when nature does not produce the same species in analogous climates, either in the plains of isothermal parallels, or on table-lands the temperature of which resembles that of places nearer the poles, we still remark a striking resemblance of appearance and physiognomy in the vegetation of the most distant countries. This phenomenon is one of the most curious in the history of organic forms. I say the history; for in vain would reason forbid man to form hypotheses on the origin of things: he is not the less tormented with these insoluble problems of the distribution of beings."

15. Insoluble—yes, assuredly, poor little beaten phantasms of palpitating clay that we are—and who asked us to solve it? Even this Humboldt, quiet-hearted and modest watcher of the ways of Heaven, in the real make of him, came at last to be so far puffed up by his vain science in declining years that he must needs write a Kosmos of things in the Universe, forsooth, as if he knew all about them! when he was not able meanwhile, (and does not seem even to have desired the ability,) to put the slightest Kosmos into his own 'Personal Narrative'; but leaves one to gather what one wants out of {216} its wild growth; or rather, to wash or winnow what may be useful out of its debris, without any vestige either of reference or index; and I must look for these fragmentary sketches of heath and grass through chapter after chapter about the races of the Indian and religion of the Spaniard,—these also of great intrinsic value, but made useless to the general reader by interspersed experiment on the drifts of the wind and the depths of the sea.

16. But one more fragment out of a note (vol. iii., p. 494) I must give, with reference to an order of the Rhododendrons as yet wholly unknown to me.

"The name of vine tree, 'uvas camaronas' (Shrimp grapes?) is given in the Andes to plants of the genus Thibaudia on account of their large succulent fruit. Thus the ancient botanists give the name of Bear's vine, 'Uva Ursi,' and vine of Mount Ida, 'Vitis Idea,' to an Arbutus and Myrtillus which belong, like the Thibaudiae, to the family of the Ericineae."

Now, though I have one entire bookcase and half of another, and a large cabinet besides, or about fifteen feet square of books on botany beside me here, and a quantity more at Oxford, I have no means whatever, in all the heap, of finding out what a Thibaudia is like. Loudon's Cyclopaedia, the only general book I have, tells me only that it will grow well in camellia houses, that its flowers develope at Christmas, and that they are beautifully varied like a fritillary: whereupon I am very anxious to see them, and taste their fruit, and be able to {217} tell my pupils something intelligible of them,—a new order, as it seems to me, among my Oreiades. But for the present I can make no room for them, and must be content, for England and the Alps, with my single class, Myrtilla, including all the fruit-bearing and (more or less) myrtle-leaved kinds; and Azalea for the fruitless flushing of the loftier tribes; taking the special name 'Aurora' for the red and purple ones of Europe, and resigning the already accepted 'Rhodora' to those of the Andes and Himalaya.

17. Of which also, with help of earnest Indian botanists, I hope nevertheless to add some little history to that of our own Oreiades; but shall set myself on the most familiar of them first, as I partly hinted in taking for the frontispiece of this volume two unchecked shoots of our commonest heath, in their state of full lustre and decline. And now I must go out and see and think—and for the first time in my life—what becomes of all these fallen blossoms, and where my own mountain Cora hides herself in winter; and where her sweet body is laid in its death.

Think of it with me, for a moment before I go. That harvest of amethyst bells, over all Scottish and Irish and Cumberland hill and moorland; what substance is there in it, yearly gathered out of the mountain winds,—stayed there, as if the morning and evening clouds had been caught out of them and woven into flowers; 'Ropes of sea-sand'—but that is child's magic {218} merely, compared to the weaving of the Heath out of the cloud. And once woven, how much of it is forever worn by the Earth? What weight of that transparent tissue, half crystal and half comb of honey, lies strewn every year dead under the snow?

I must go and look, and can write no more to-day; nor to-morrow neither. I must gather slowly what I see, and remember; and meantime leaving, to be dealt with afterwards, the difficult and quite separate question of the production of wood, I will close this first volume of Proserpina with some necessary statements respecting the operations, serviceable to other creatures than themselves, in which the lives of the noblest plants are ended: honourable in this service equally, though evanescent, some,—in the passing of a breeze—or the dying of a day;—and patient some, of storm and time, serene in fruitful sanctity, through all the uncounted ages which Man has polluted with his tears.

* * * * *

{219}

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SEED AND HUSK.

1. Not the least sorrowful, nor least absurd of the confusions brought on us by unscholarly botanists, blundering into foreign languages, when they do not know how to use their own, is that which has followed on their practice of calling the seed-vessels of flowers 'egg-vessels,'[65] in Latin; thus involving total loss of the power of the good old English word 'husk,' and the good old French one, 'cosse.' For all the treasuries of plants (see Chapter IV., Sec. 17) may be best conceived, and described, generally, as consisting of 'seed' and 'husk,'—for the most part two or more seeds, in a husk composed of two or more parts, as pease in their shell, pips in an orange, or kernels in a walnut; but whatever their number, or the method of their enclosure, let the student keep clear in his mind, for the base of all study of fructification, the broad distinction between the seed, as one thing, and the husk as another: the seed, essential to the continuance of the plant's race; and the husk, {220} adapted, primarily, to its guard and dissemination; but secondarily, to quite other and far more important functions.

2. For on this distinction follows another practical one of great importance. A seed may serve, and many do mightily serve, for the food of man, when boiled, crushed, or otherwise industriously prepared by man himself, for his mere sustenance. But the husk of the seed is prepared in many cases for the delight of his eyes, and the pleasure of his palate, by Nature herself, and is then called a 'fruit.'

3. The varieties of structure both in seed and husk, and yet more, the manner in which the one is contained, and distributed by, the other, are infinite; and in some cases the husk is apparently wanting, or takes some unrecognizable form. But in far the plurality of instances the two parts of the plant's treasury are easily distinguishable, and must be separately studied, whatever their apparent closeness of relation, or, (as in all natural things,) the equivocation sometimes taking place between the one and the other. To me, the especially curious point in this matter is that, while I find the most elaborate accounts given by botanists of the stages of growth in each of these parts of the treasury, they never say of what use the guardian is to the guarded part, irrespective of its service to man. The mechanical action of the husk in containing and scattering the seeds, they indeed often notice and insist on; but they do not tell {221} us of what, if any, nutritious or fostering use the rind is to a chestnut, or an orange's pulp to its pips, or a peach's juice to its stone.