12. Of these many and various forms, I find the manners and customs alike inconstant; and this of especially singular in them—that the Alpine and northern species bloom hardily in contest with the retiring snows, while with us they wait till the spring is past, and offer themselves to us only in consolation for the vanished violet and primrose. As we farther examine the ways of plants, I suppose we shall find some that determine upon a fixed season, and will bloom methodically in June or July, whether in Abyssinia or Greenland; and others, like the violet and crocus, which are flowers of the spring, at whatever time of the favouring or frowning year the spring returns to their country. I suppose also that botanists and gardeners know all these matters thoroughly: but they don't put them into their books, and the clear notions of them only come to me now, as I think and watch.

13. Broadly, however, the families of the Veronica fall into three main divisions,—those which have round leaves lobed at the edge, like ground ivy; those which have small thyme-like leaves; and those which have long leaves like a foxglove's, only smaller—never more than two or two and a half inches long. I therefore take them in these connections, though without any bar between the groups; only separating the Regina from the other thyme-leaved ones, to give her due precedence; and the rest will then arrange themselves into twenty families, easily distinguishable and memorable.



I have chosen for Veronica Regina, the brave Icelandic one, which pierces the snow in first spring, with lovely small shoots of perfectly set leaves, no larger than a grain of wheat; the flowers in a lifted cluster of five or six together, not crowded, yet not loose; large, for veronica—about the size of a silver penny, or say half an inch across—deep blue, with ruby centre.

My woodcut, Fig. 4, is outlined[22] from the beautiful engraving D. 342,[23]—there called 'fruticulosa,' from the number of the young shoots.

14. Beneath the Regina, come the twenty easily distinguished families, namely:—

1. Chamaedrys. 'Ground-oak.' I cannot tell why so called—its small and rounded leaves having nothing like oak leaves about them, except the serration, which is common to half, at least, of all leaves that grow. But the idea is all over Europe, apparently. Fr. 'petit chene:' German and English 'Germander,' a merely corrupt form of Chamaedrys.

The representative English veronica "Germander Speedwell"—very prettily drawn in S. 986; too tall and weed-like in D. 448.

2. Hederifolia. Ivy-leaved: but more properly, cymbalaria-leaved. It is the English field representative, though blue-flowered, of the Byzantine white veronica, V. Cymbalaria, very beautifully drawn in G. 9. Hederifolia well in D. 428.

3. Agrestis. Fr. 'Rustique.' We ought however clearly to understand whether 'agrestis,' used by English botanists, is meant to imply a literally field flower, or only a 'rustic' one, which might as properly grow in a wood. I shall always myself use 'agrestis' in the literal sense, and 'rustica' for 'rustique.' I see no reason, in the present case, for separating the Polite from the Rustic flower: the agrestis, D. 449 and S. 971, seems to me not more meekly recumbent, nor more frankly cultureless, than the so-called Polita, S. 972: there seems also no French acknowledgment of its politeness, and the Greek family, G. 8, seem the rudest and wildest of all.

Quite a field flower it is, I believe, lying always low on the ground; recumbent, but not creeping. Note this difference: no fastening roots are thrown out by the reposing stems of this Veronica; a creeping or accurately 'rampant' plant roots itself in advancing. Conf. Nos. 5, 6.

4. Arvensis. We have yet to note a still finer distinction in epithet. 'Agrestis' will properly mean a flower of the open ground—yet not caring whether the piece of earth be cultivated or not, so long as it is under clear sky. But when agri-culture has turned the unfruitful acres into 'arva beata,'—if then the plant thrust itself between the furrows of the plough, it is properly called 'Arvensis.'

I don't quite see my way to the same distinction in English,—perhaps I may get into the habit, as time goes on, of calling the Arvenses consistently furrow-flowers, and the Agrestes field-flowers. Furrow-veronica is a tiresomely long name, but must do for the present, as the best interpretation of its Latin character, "vulgatissima in cultis et arvis." D. 515. The blossom itself is exquisitely delicate; and we may be thankful, both here and in Denmark, for such a lovely 'vulgate.'

5. Montana. D. 1201. The first really creeping plant we have had to notice. It throws out roots from the recumbent stems. Otherwise like agrestis, it has leaves like ground-ivy. Called a wood species in the text of D.

6. Persica. An eastern form, but now perfectly naturalized here—D. 1982; S. 973. The flowers very large, and extremely beautiful, but only one springing from each leaf-axil.

Leaves and stem like Montana; and also creeping with new-roots at intervals.

7. Triphylla, (not triphyllos,—see Flora Suecica, 22). Meaning trifid-leaved; but the leaf is really divided into five lobes, not three—see S. 974, and G. 10. The palmate form of the leaf seems a mere caprice, and indicates no transitional form in the plant: it may be accepted as only a momentary compliment of mimicry to the geraniums. The Siberian variety, 'multifida,' C. 1679, divides itself almost as the submerged leaves of the water-ranunculus.

The triphylla itself is widely diffused, growing alike on the sandy fields of Kent, and of Troy. In D. 627 is given an extremely delicate and minute northern type, the flowers springing as in Persica, one from each leaf-axil, and at distant intervals.

8. Officinalis. D. 248, S. 294. Fr. 'Veronique officinale'; (Germ. Gebrauchlicher Ehrenpreis,) our commonest English and Welsh speedwell; richest in cluster and frankest in roadside growth, whether on bank or rock; but assuredly liking either a bank or a rock, and the top of a wall better than the shelter of one. Uncountable 'myriads,' I am tempted to write, but, cautiously and literally, 'hundreds' of blossoms—if one could count,—ranging certainly towards the thousand in some groups, all bright at once, make our Westmoreland lanes look as if they were decked for weddings, in early summer. In the Danish Flora it is drawn small and poor; its southern type being the true one: but it is difficult to explain the difference between the look of a flower which really suffers, as in this instance, by a colder climate, and becomes mean and weak, as well as dwarfed; and one which is braced and brightened by the cold, though diminished, as if under the charge and charm of an affectionate fairy, and becomes a joyfully patriotic inheritor of wilder scenes and skies. Medicinal, to soul and body alike, this gracious and domestic flower; though astringent and bitter in the juice. It is the Welsh deeply honoured 'Fluellen.'—See final note on the myth of Veronica, see Sec. 18.

9. Thymifolia. Thyme-leaved, G. 6. Of course the longest possible word—serpyllifolia—is used in S. 978. It is a high mountain plant, growing on the top of Crete as the snow retires; and the Veronica minor of Gerarde; "the roote is small and threddie, taking hold of the upper surface of the earth, where it spreadeth." So also it is drawn as a creeper in F. 492, where the flower appears to be oppressed and concealed by the leafage.

10. Minuta, called 'hirsuta' in S. 985: an ugly characteristic to name the lovely little thing by. The distinct blue lines in the petals might perhaps justify 'picta' or 'lineata,' rather than an epithet of size; but I suppose it is Gerarde's Minima, and so leave it, more safely named as 'minute' than 'least.' For I think the next variety may dispute the leastness.



11. Verna. D. 252. Mountains, in dry places in early spring. Upright, and confused in the leafage, which is sharp-pointed and close set, much hiding the blossom, but of extreme elegance, fit for a sacred foreground; as any gentle student will feel, who copies this outline from the Flora Danica, Fig. 5.

12. Peregrina. Another extremely small variety, nearly pink in colour, passing into bluish lilac and white. American; but called, I do not see why, 'Veronique voyageuse,' by the French, and Fremder Ehrenpreis in Germany. Given as a frequent English weed in S. 927.

13. Alpina. Veronique des Alpes. Gebirgs Ehrenpreis. Still minute; its scarcely distinct flowers forming a close head among the leaves; round-petalled in D. 16, but sharp, as usual, in S. 980. On the Norway Alps in grassy places; and in Scotland by the side of mountain rills; but rare. On Ben Nevis and Lachin y Gair (S.)

14. Scutellata. From the shield-like shape of its seed-vessels. Veronique a Ecusson; Schildfruchtiger Ehrenpreis. But the seed-vessels are more heart shape than shield. Marsh Speedwell. S. 988, D. 209,—in the one pink, in the other blue; but again in D. 1561, pink.

"In flooded meadows, common." (D.) A spoiled and scattered form; the seeds too conspicuous, but the flowers very delicate, hence 'Gratiola minima' in Gesner. The confused ramification of the clusters worth noting, in relation to the equally straggling fibres of root.

15. Spicata. S. 982: very prettily done, representing the inside of the flower as deep blue, the outside pale. The top of the spire, all calices, the calyx being indeed, through all the veronicas, an important and persistent member.

The tendency to arrange itself in spikes is to be noted as a degradation of the veronic character; connecting it on one side with the snapdragons, on the other with the ophryds. In Veronica Ophrydea, (C. 2210,) this resemblance to the contorted tribe is carried so far that "the corolla of the veronica becomes irregular, the tube gibbous, the faux (throat) hairy, and three of the laciniae (lobes of petals) variously twisted." The spire of blossom, violet-coloured, is then close set, and exactly resembles an ophryd, except in being sharper at the top. The engraved outline of the blossom is good, and very curious.

16. Gentianoides. This is the most directly and curiously imitative among the—shall we call them—'histrionic' types of Veronica. It grows exactly like a clustered upright gentian; has the same kind of leaves at its root, and springs with the same bright vitality among the retiring snows of the Bithynian Olympus. (G. 5.) If, however, the Caucasian flower, C. 1002, be the same, it has lost its perfect grace in luxuriance, growing as large as an asphodel, and with root-leaves half a foot long.

The petals are much veined; and this, of all veronicas, has the lower petal smallest in proportion to the three above,—"triplo aut quadruplo minori." (G.)

17. Stagnarum. Marsh-Veronica. The last four families we have been examining vary from the typical Veronicas not only in their lance-shaped clusters, but in their lengthened, and often every way much enlarged leaves also: and the two which we now will take in association, 17 and 18, carry the change in aspect farthest of any, being both of them true water-plants, with strong stems and thick leaves. The present name of my Veronica Stagnarum is however V. anagallis, a mere insult to the little water primula, which one plant of the Veronica would make fifty of. This is a rank water-weed, having confused bunches of blossom and seed, like unripe currants, dangling from the leaf-axils. So that where the little triphylla, (No. 7, above,) has only one blossom, daintily set, and well seen, this has a litter of twenty-five or thirty on a long stalk, of which only three or four are well out as flowers, and the rest are mere knobs of bud or seed. The stalk is thick (half an inch round at the bottom), the leaves long and misshapen. "Frequens in fossis," D. 203. French, Mouron d'Eau, but I don't know the root or exact meaning of Mouron.

An ugly Australian species, 'labiata,' C. 1660, has leaves two inches long, of the shape of an aloe's, and partly aloeine in texture, "sawed with unequal, fleshy, pointed teeth."

18. Fontium. Brook-Veronica. Brook-Lime, the Anglo-Saxon 'lime' from Latin limus, meaning the soft mud of streams. German 'Bach-bunge' (Brook-purse?) ridiculously changed by the botanists into 'Beccabunga,' for a Latin name! Very beautiful in its crowded green leaves as a stream-companion; rich and bright more than watercress. See notice of it at Matlock, in 'Modern Painters,' vol. v.

19. Clara. Veronique des rochers. Saxatilis, I suppose, in Sowerby, but am not sure of having identified that with my own favourite, for which I therefore keep the name 'Clara,' (see above, Sec. 9); and the other rock variety, if indeed another, mast be remembered, together with it.

20. Glauca. G. 7. And this, at all events, with the Clara, is to be remembered as closing the series of twenty families, acknowledged by Proserpina. It is a beautiful low-growing ivy-leaved type, with flowers of subdued lilac blue. On Mount Hymettus: no other locality given in the Flora Graeca.

15. I am sorry, and shall always be so, when the varieties of any flower which I have to commend to the student's memory, exceed ten or twelve in number; but I am content to gratify his pride with lengthier task, if indeed he will resign himself to the imperative close of the more inclusive catalogue, and be content to know the twelve, or sixteen, or twenty, acknowledged families, thoroughly; and only in their illustration to think of rarer forms. The object of 'Proserpina' is to make him happily cognizant of the common aspect of Greek and English flowers; under the term 'English,' comprehending the Saxon, Celtic, Norman, and Danish Floras. Of the evergreen shrub alluded to in Sec. 11 above, the Veronica Decussata of the Pacific, which is "a bushy evergreen, with beautifully set cross-leaves, and white blossoms scented like olea fragrans," I should like him only to read with much surprise, and some incredulity, in Pinkerton's or other entertaining travellers' voyages.

16. And of the families given, he is to note for the common simple characteristic, that they are quatrefoils referred to a more or less elevated position on a central stem, and having, in that relation, the lowermost petal diminished, contrary to the almost universal habit of other flowers to develope in such a position the lower petal chiefly, that it may have its full share of light. You will find nothing but blunder and embarrassment result from any endeavour to enter into further particulars, such as "the relation of the dissepiment with respect to the valves of the capsule," etc., etc., since "in the various species of Veronica almost every kind of dehiscence may be observed" (C. under V. perfoliata, 1936, an Australian species). Sibthorpe gives the entire definition of Veronica with only one epithet added to mine, "Corolla quadrifida, rotata, lacinia infima angustiore," but I do not know what 'rotata' here means, as there is no appearance of revolved action in the petals, so far as I can see.

17. Of the mythic or poetic significance of the veronica, there is less to be said than of its natural beauty. I have not been able to discover with what feeling, or at what time, its sacred name was originally given; and the legend of S. Veronica herself is, in the substance of it, irrational, and therefore incredible. The meaning of the term 'rational,' as applied to a legend or miracle, is, that there has been an intelligible need for the permission of the miracle at the time when it is recorded; and that the nature and manner of the act itself should be comprehensible in the scope. There was thus quite simple need for Christ to feed the multitudes, and to appear to S. Paul; but no need, so far as human intelligence can reach, for the reflection of His features upon a piece of linen which could be seen by not one in a million of the disciples to whom He might more easily, at any time, manifest Himself personally and perfectly. Nor, I believe, has the story of S. Veronica ever been asserted to be other than symbolic by the sincere teachers of the Church; and, even so far as in that merely explanatory function, it became the seal of an extreme sorrow, it is not easy to understand how the pensive fable was associated with a flower so familiar, so bright, and so popularly of good omen, as the Speedwell.

18. Yet, the fact being actually so, and this consecration of the veronica being certainly far more ancient and earnest than the faintly romantic and extremely absurd legend of the forget-me-not; the speedwell has assuredly the higher claim to be given and accepted as a token of pure and faithful love, and to be trusted as a sweet sign that the innocence of affection is indeed more frequent, and the appointed destiny of its faith more fortunate, than our inattentive hearts have hitherto discerned.

19. And this the more, because the recognized virtues and uses of the plant are real and manifold; and the ideas of a peculiar honourableness and worth of life connected with it by the German popular name 'Honour-prize'; while to the heart of the British race, the same thought is brought home by Shakespeare's adoption of the flower's Welsh name, for the faithfullest common soldier of his ideal king. As a lover's pledge, therefore, it does not merely mean memory;—for, indeed, why should love be thought of as such at all, if it need to promise not to forget?—but the blossom is significant also of the lover's best virtues, patience in suffering, purity in thought, gaiety in courage, and serenity in truth: and therefore I make it, worthily, the clasping and central flower of the Cytherides.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV.

GIULIETTA.

1. Supposing that, in early life, one had the power of living to one's fancy,—and why should we not, if the said fancy were restrained by the knowledge of the two great laws concerning our nature, that happiness is increased, not by the enlargement of the possessions, but of the heart; and days lengthened, not by the crowding of emotions, but the economy of them?—if thus taught, we had, I repeat, the ordering of our house and estate in our own hands, I believe no manner of temperance in pleasure would be better rewarded than that of making our gardens gay only with common flowers; and leaving those which needed care for their transplanted life to be found in their native places when we travelled. So long as I had crocus and daisy in the spring, roses in the summer, and hollyhocks and pinks in the autumn, I used to be myself independent of farther horticulture,—and it is only now that I am old, and since pleasant travelling has become impossible to me, that I am thankful to have the white narcissus in my borders, instead of waiting to walk through the fragrance of the meadows of Clarens; and pleased to see the milkwort blue on my scythe-mown banks, since I cannot gather it any more on the rocks of the Vosges, or in the divine glens of Jura.

2. Among the losses, all the more fatal in being unfelt, brought upon us by the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day,—whether indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the common daily flattery on which the power of the British press first depends, I cannot judge;—but, for one or other of such motives, I saw lately in some illustrated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fashioned and modern travel, representing, as the type of things passed away, the outside passengers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent distress from the swirl of a winter snowstorm; and for type of the present Elysian dispensation, the inside of a first-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful young lady in the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing, Daily news in hand, with a young officer—her fortunate vis-a-vis—on the subject of our military successes in Afghanistan and Zululand.[24]

3. I will not, in presenting—it must not be called the other side, but the supplementary, and wilfully omitted, facts, of this ideal,—oppose, as I fairly might, the discomforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the chariot-and-four, with outriders and courier, of ancient noblesse. I will compare only the actual facts, in the former and in latter years, of my own journey from Paris to Geneva. As matters are now arranged, I find myself, at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused crowd with which I am presently to contend for a seat, in the dim light and cigar-stench of the great station of the Lyons line. Making slow way through the hostilities of the platform, in partly real, partly weak politeness, as may be, I find the corner seats of course already full of prohibitory cloaks and umbrellas; but manage to get a middle back one; the net overhead is already surcharged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I squeeze my desk as well as I can between my legs, and arrange what wraps I have about my knees and shoulders. Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing themselves for sleep: the last arrangement for the night being to shut up both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary modification of the night air.

4. The banging and bumping of the carriages over the turn-tables wakes me up as I am beginning to doze, at Fontainebleau, and again at Sens; and the trilling and thrilling of the little telegraph bell establishes itself in my ears, and stays there, trilling me at last into a shivering, suspicious sort of sleep, which, with a few vaguely fretful shrugs and fidgets, carries me as far as Tonnerre, where the 'quinze minutes d'arret' revolutionize everything; and I get a turn or two on the platform, and perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear morning; and so generally keep awake past Mont Bard, remembering the happy walks one used to have on the terrace under Buffon's tower, and thence watching, if perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film of moonlight may show the far undulating masses of the hills of Citeaux. But most likely one knows the place where the great old view used to be only by the sensible quickening of the pace as the train turns down the incline, and crashes through the trenched cliffs into the confusion and high clattering vault of the station at Dijon.

5. And as my journey is almost always in the springtime, the twisted spire of the cathedral usually shows itself against the first grey of dawn, as we run out again southwards: and resolving to watch the sunrise, I fall more complacently asleep,—and the sun is really up by the time one has to change carriages, and get morning coffee at Macon. And from Amberieux, through the Jura valley, one is more or less feverishly happy and thankful, not so much for being in sight of Mont Blanc again, as in having got through the nasty and gloomy night journey; and then the sight of the Rhone and the Saleve seems only like a dream, presently to end in nothingness; till, covered with dust, and feeling as if one never should be fit for anything any more, one staggers down the hill to the Hotel des Bergues, and sees the dirtied Rhone, with its new iron bridge, and the smoke of a new factory exactly dividing the line of the aiguilles of Chamouni.

6. That is the journey as it is now,—and as, for me, it must be; except on foot, since there is now no other way of making it. But this was the way we used to manage it in old days:—

Very early in Continental transits we had found out that the family travelling carriage, taking much time and ingenuity to load, needing at the least three, usually four—horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only jolted and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every way to more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehicles; getting itself jammed in archways, wrenched with damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of justifiable reprobation among market stalls. So when we knew better, my father and mother always had their own old-fashioned light two-horse carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quantity of front and side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot; and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk, without troubling the driver to think of me.

7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judee were mere pyramids of purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding vines of the coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the 'Seven Lamps,' in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his wholly matchless way in the last chapter of 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Monday, the drive of drives, through the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the 'Derniers Kochers' and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew. Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.

And on Thursday, the eighth or ninth day from Paris, days all spent patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and cloud.

8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with sore shortcomings. It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of education for youth;—and my certainty that a true knowledge of their native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me to gather into system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts.[25] And of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want chiefly the details of the Flora, I find none; and in this instance of the milkwort, whose name I was first told by the Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then walking with me on the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges, west of Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint that, being then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to draw the great plain and distant spire, it was of no use trying in the poor remainder of life to do anything serious,—then, and there, I say, for the first time examining the strange little flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I don't find a single note of its preferences or antipathies in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to which it condescends, on the Alps or Apennines.

9. But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at Brantwood, that it is capricious and fastidious beyond any other little blossom I know of. In laying out the rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of stone, among which nearly every other wild flower that likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to root itself. But at the top of all, one terrace was brought to mathematically true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed with delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept duly trim by the scythe. And only on this terrace does the Giulietta choose to show herself,—and even there, not in any consistent places, but gleaming out here in one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected sky through cloud; and entirely refusing to allow either bank or terrace to be mown the least trim during her time of disport there. So spared and indulged, there are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds; no more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by watch through day and night, than her recumbent clusters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing through the grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue.

10. I will not attempt at present to arrange the varieties of the Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and presumably characteristic forms belong to the Cape; and only since Mr. Froude came back from his African explorings have I been able to get any clear idea of the brilliancy and associated infinitude of the Cape flowers. If I could but write down the substance of what he has told me, in the course of a chat or two, which have been among the best privileges of my recent stay in London, (prolonged as it has been by recurrence of illness,) it would be a better summary of what should be generally known in the natural history of southern plants than I could glean from fifty volumes of horticultural botany. In the meantime, everything being again thrown out of gear by the aforesaid illness, I must let this piece of 'Proserpina' break off, as most of my work does—and as perhaps all of it may soon do—leaving only suggestion for the happier research of the students who trust me thus far.

11. Some essential points respecting the flower I shall note, however, before ending. There is one large and frequent species of it of which the flowers are delicately yellow, touched with tawny red, forming one of the chief elements of wild foreground vegetation in the healthy districts of hard Alpine limestone.[26] This is, I believe, the only European type of the large Cape varieties, in all of which, judging from such plates as have been accessible to me, the crests or fringes of the lower petal are less conspicuous than in the smaller species; and the flower almost takes the aspect of a broom-blossom or pease-blossom. In the smaller European varieties, the white fringes of the lower petal are the most important and characteristic part of the flower, and they are, among European wild flowers, absolutely without any likeness of associated structure. The fringes or crests which, towards the origin of petals, so often give a frosted or gemmed appearance to the centres of flowers, are here thrown to the extremity of the petal, and suggest an almost coralline structure of blossom, which in no other instance whatever has been imitated, still less carried out into its conceivable varieties of form. How many such varieties might have been produced if these fringes of the Giulietta, or those already alluded to of Lucia nivea, had been repeated and enlarged; as the type, once adopted for complex bloom in the thistle-head, is multiplied in the innumerable gradations of thistle, teasel, hawkweed, and aster! We might have had flowers edged with lace finer than was ever woven by mortal fingers, or tasselled and braided with fretwork of silver, never tarnished—or hoarfrost that grew brighter in the sun. But it was not to be, and after a few hints of what might be done in this kind, the Fate, or Folly, or, on recent theories, the extreme fitness—and consequent survival, of the Thistles and Dandelions, entirely drives the fringed Lucias and blue-flushing milkworts out of common human neighbourhood, to live recluse lives with the memories of the abbots of Cluny, and pastors of Piedmont.

12. I have called the Giulietta 'blue-flushing' because it is one of the group of exquisite flowers which at the time of their own blossoming, breathe their colour into the surrounding leaves and supporting stem. Very notably the Grape hyacinth and Jura hyacinth, and some of the Vestals, empurpling all their green leaves even to the ground: a quite distinct nature in the flower, observe, this possession of a power to kindle the leaf and stem with its own passion, from that of the heaths, roses, or lilies, where the determined bracts or calicos assert themselves in opposition to the blossom, as little pine-leaves, or mosses, or brown paper packages, and the like.

13. The Giulietta, however, is again entirely separate from the other leaf-flushing blossoms, in that, after the two green leaves next the flower have glowed with its blue, while it lived, they do not fade or waste with it, but return to their own former green simplicity, and close over it to protect the seed. I only know this to be the case with the Giulietta Regina; but suppose it to be (with variety of course in the colours) a condition in other species,—though of course nothing is ever said of it in the botanical accounts of them. I gather, however, from Curtis's careful drawings that the prevailing colour of the Cape species is purple, thus justifying still further my placing them among the Cytherides; and I am content to take the descriptive epithets at present given them, for the following five of this southern group, hoping that they may be explained for me afterwards by helpful friends.

14. Bracteolata, C. 345. Oppositifolia, C. 492. Speciosa, C. 1790. These three all purple, and scarcely distinguishable from sweet pease-blossom, only smaller.

Stipulacea, C. 1715. Small, and very beautiful, lilac and purple, with a leaf and mode of growth like rosemary. The "Foxtail" milkwort, whose name I don't accept, C. 1006, is intermediate between this and the next species.

15. Mixta, C. 1714. I don't see what mingling is meant, except that it is just like Erica tetralix in the leaf, only, apparently, having little four-petalled pinks for blossoms. This appearance is thus botanically explained. I do not myself understand the description, but copy it, thinking it may be of use to somebody. "The apex of the carina is expanded into a two-lobed plain petal, the lobes of which are emarginate. This appendix is of a bright rose colour, and forms the principal part of the flower." The describer relaxes, or relapses, into common language so far as to add that 'this appendix' "dispersed among the green foliage in every part of the shrub, gives it a pretty lively appearance."

Perhaps this may also be worth extracting.

"Carina, deeply channeled, of a saturated purple within, sides folded together, so as to include and firmly embrace the style and stamens, which, when arrived at maturity, upon being moved, escape elastically from their confinement, and strike against the two erect petals or alae—by which the pollen is dispersed.

"Stem shrubby, with long flexile branches." (Length or height not told. I imagine like an ordinary heath's.)

The term 'carina,' occurring twice in the above description, is peculiar to the structure of the pease and milk-worts; we will examine it afterwards. The European varieties of the milkwort, except the chamaebuxus, are all minute,—and, their ordinary epithets being at least inoffensive, I give them for reference till we find prettier ones; altering only the Calcarea, because we could not have a 'Chalk Juliet,' and two varieties of the Regina, changed for reason good—her name, according to the last modern refinements of grace and ease in pronunciation, being Eu-vularis, var. genuina! My readers may more happily remember her and her sister as follows:—

16. (I.) Giulietta Regina. Pure blue. The same in colour, form, and size, throughout Europe.

(II.) Giulietta Soror-Reginae. Pale, reddish-blue or white in the flower, and smaller in the leaf, otherwise like the Regina.

(III.) Giulietta Depressa. The smallest of those I can find drawings of. Flowers, blue; lilac in the fringe, and no bigger than pins' heads; the leaves quite gem-like in minuteness and order.

(IV.) Giulietta Cisterciana. Its present name, 'Calcarea,' is meant, in botanic Latin, to express its growth on limestone or chalk mountains. But we might as well call the South Down sheep, Calcareous mutton. My epithet will rightly associate it with the Burgundian hills round Cluny and Citeaux. Its ground leaves are much larger than those of the Depressa; the flower a little larger, but very pale.

(V.) Giulietta Austriaca. Pink, and very lovely, with bold cluster of ground leaves, but itself minute—almost dwarf. Called 'small bitter milkwort' by S. How far distinct from the next following one, Norwegian, is not told.

The above five kinds are given by Sowerby as British, but I have never found the Austriaca myself.

(VI.) Giulietta Amara. Norwegian. Very quaint in blossom outline, like a little blue rabbit with long ears. D. 1169.

17. Nobody tells me why either this last or No. 5 have been called bitter; and Gerarde's five kinds are distinguished only by colour—blue, red, white, purple, and "the dark, of an overworn ill-favoured colour, which maketh it to differ from all others of his kind." I find no account of this ill-favoured one elsewhere. The white is my Soror Reginae; the red must be the Austriaca; but the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn indeed. All of them must have been more common in Gerarde's time than now, for he goes on to say "Milk-woort is called Ambarualis flos. so called because it doth specially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or Rogation-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in the countries to walk the procession do make themselves garlands and nosegaies, in English we may call it Crosse flower, Gang flower, Rogation flower, and Milk-woort."

18. Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the Cytherides, I too hastily concluded that the ascription to this plant of helpfulness to nursing mothers was 'more than ordinarily false'; thinking that its rarity could never have allowed it to be fairly tried. If indeed true, or in any degree true, the flower has the best right of all to be classed with the Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter gluttonies with dying and useless ones.

19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster—nor the chance of watching one in seed:—The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of April, and leaves no sign of itself—that I ever found. The botanists tell me that its fruit "dehisces loculicidally," which I suppose is botanic for "splits like boxes," (but boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used to make and handle them before railways). Out of the split boxes fall seeds—too few; and, as aforesaid, the plant never seems to grow again in the same spot. I should thankfully receive any notes from friends happy enough to live near milkwort banks, on the manner of its nativity.

20. Meanwhile, the Thistle, and the Nettle, and the Dock, and the Dandelion are cared for in their generations by the finest arts of—Providence, shall we say? or of the spirits appointed to punish our own want of Providence? May I ask the reader to look back to the seventh chapter of the first volume, for it contains suggestions of thoughts which came to me at a time of very earnest and faithful inquiry, set down, I now see too shortly, under the press of reading they involved, but intelligible enough if they are read as slowly as they were written, and especially note the paragraph of summary of p. 121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and as judge; watching and rewarding the conditions which induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men: comparing with it carefully the close of the fourth chapter, p. 85,[27] which contains, for the now recklessly multiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential to their skill, and inexorable upon their labour.

21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more than his usual care in the frontispiece to this number of 'Proserpina,' was one of many executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.[28]

22. But also, in beginning 'Proserpina,' I intended to give many illustrations of the light and shade of foreground leaves belonging to the nobler groups of thistles, because I thought they had been neglected by ordinary botanical draughtsmen; not knowing at that time either the original drawings at Oxford for the 'Flora Graeca,' or the nobly engraved plates executed in the close of the last century for the 'Flora Danica' and 'Flora Londinensis.' The latter is in the most difficult portraiture of the larger plants, even the more wonderful of the two; and had I seen the miracles of skill, patience, and faithful study which are collected in the first and second volumes, published in 1777 and 1798, I believe my own work would never have been undertaken.[29] Such as it is, however, I may still, health being granted me, persevere in it; for my own leaf and branch studies express conditions of shade which even these most exquisite botanical plates ignore; and exemplify uses of the pen and pencil which cannot be learned from the inimitable fineness of line engraving. The frontispiece to this number, for instance, (a seeding head of the commonest field-thistle of our London suburbs,) copied with a steel pen on smooth grey paper, and the drawing softly touched with white on the nearer thorns, may well surpass the effect of the plate.

23. In the following number of 'Proserpina' I have been tempted to follow, with more minute notice than usual, the 'conditions of adversity' which, as they fret the thistle tribe into jagged malice, have humbled the beauty of the great domestic group of the Vestals into confused likenesses of the Dragonweed and Nettle: but I feel every hour more and more the necessity of separating the treatment of subjects in 'Proserpina' from the microscopic curiosities of recent botanic illustration, nor shall this work close, if my strength hold, without fulfilling in some sort, the effort begun long ago in 'Modern Painters,' to interpret the grace of the larger blossoming trees, and the mysteries of leafy form which clothe the Swiss precipice with gentleness, and colour with softest azure the rich horizons of England and Italy.

* * * * *

CHAPTER V.

BRUNELLA.

1. It ought to have been added to the statements of general law in irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this volume, Sec. 6, that if the petals, while brought into relations of inequality, still retain their perfect petal form,—and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, remain clearly leaves, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and assume no grotesque or obscure outline,—the flower, though injured, is not to be thought of as corrupted or misled. But if any of the petals lose their definite character as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, or strained into any other form or function than that of petals, the flower is to be looked upon as affected by some kind of constant evil influence; and, so far as we conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the protection or affliction of the inferior orders of creatures, it will be felt to bear the aspect of possession by, or pollution by, a more or less degraded Spirit.[30]

2. I have already enough spoken of the special manifestation of this character in the orders Contorta and Satyrium, vol. i., p. 91, and the reader will find the parallel aspects of the Draconidae dwelt upon at length in the 86th and 87th paragraphs of the 'Queen of the Air,' where also their relation to the labiate group is touched upon. But I am far more embarrassed by the symbolism of that group which I called 'Vestales,' from their especially domestic character and their serviceable purity; but which may be, with more convenience perhaps, simply recognizable as 'Menthae.'

3. These are, to our northern countries, what the spice-bearing trees are in the tropics;—our thyme, lavender, mint, marjoram, and their like, separating themselves not less in the health giving or strengthening character of their scent from the flowers more or less enervating in perfume, as the rose, orange, and violet,—than in their humble colours and forms from the grace and splendour of those higher tribes; thus allowing themselves to be summed under the general word 'balm' more truly than the balsams from which the word is derived. Giving the most pure and healing powers to the air around them; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly in dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; but only to be rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors when dried; not tempting any one to luxury, nor expressive of any kind of exultation. Brides do not deck themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal arches with mint.

4. It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these flowers have any extreme beauty in colour. The blue sage is the only one of vivid hue at all; and we never think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or bluebell: thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of the other purple varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or lappeted as to look at first like some imperfect form of snapdragon for the most part spotted also, wrinkled as if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, and springing out of calices which, in their clustering spines, embody the general roughness of the plant.

5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should think me unkind or intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all the sweet reginas of the spring is over—the reign of the silvia and anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the grass,—the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.

6. Prunell, or Brunell—Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnaeus, and idly following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its name—of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in English—meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.

7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the scattered blossoms;—of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain, and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of the cluster broken short away altogether.

8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes. But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens, therefore—to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged wasps in it,—and perceive therewith the following particulars.

9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe.

Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose of use or decoration—any more than a hearth-brush put for a helmet-crest,—and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw, edged with ghastly teeth,—and yet more, that the hollow within begins to suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen glands.

I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by imagination. Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant, Brunelle.

10. The truth of all popular traditions as to the healing power of herbs will be tried impartially as soon as men again desire to lead healthy lives; but I shall not in 'Proserpina' retain any of the names of their gathered and dead or distilled substance, but name them always from the characters of their life. I retain, however, for this plant its name Brunella, Fr. Brunelle, because we may ourselves understand it as a derivation from Brune; and I bring it here before the reader's attention as giving him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of degradation which takes place in the forms of flowers under more or less malefic influence, causing distortion and disguise of their floral structure. Thus it is not the normal character of a flower petal to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish's jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal's throat. A really uncorrupted flower suggests none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself.

11. I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, with exactitude which has rendered the definition authoritative for all time, the tribe to which this Brownie flower belongs, constituting them his fourth class, and describing them in terms even more depreciatingly imaginative than any I have ventured to use myself. I translate the passage (vol. i., p. 177):—

12. "The name of Labiate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which, beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which is either single or double. It is proper to a labiate flower,—first, that it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat unifolium), for the most part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper hood (cucullum papyraceum); and, secondly, that its pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four seeds, which ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their own seed-vessel, by which a labiate flower is distinguished from a personate one, whose pistil becomes a capsule far divided from the calyx (a calyce longo divisam). And a labiate flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which have four seeds, in that the lips of a labiate flower have a gape like the face of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emulous of animal form."

13. This class is then divided into four sections.

In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked—"galeatum est, vel falcatum." In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon—"cochlearis instar est excavatum." In the third the upper lip is erect. And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all.

The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once rejecting a classification of lipped plants into three classes that have lips, and one that has none, and in which the lips of those that have got any, are like helmets and spoons.

Linnaeus, in 1758, grouped the family into two divisions, by the form of the calyx, (five-fold or two-fold), and then went into the wildest confusion in distinction of species,—sometimes by the form of corolla, sometimes by that of calyx, sometimes by that of the filaments, sometimes by that of the stigma, and sometimes by that of the seed. As, for instance, thyme is to be identified by the calyx having hairs in its throat, dead nettle by having bristles in its mouth, lion's tail by having bones in its anthers (antherae punctis osseis adspersae), and teucrium by having its upper lip cut in two!

14. St. Hilaire, in 1805, divides again into four sections, but as three of these depend on form of corolla, and the fourth on abortion of stamens, the reader may conclude practically, that logical division of the family is impossible, and that all he can do, or that there is the smallest occasion for his doing, is first to understand the typical structure thoroughly, and then to know a certain number of forms accurately, grouping the others round them at convenient distances; and, finally, to attach to their known forms such simple names as may be utterable by children, and memorable by old people, with more ease and benefit than the 'Galeopsis Eu-te-trahit,' 'Lamium Galeobdalon,' or 'Scutellaria Galericulata,'and the like, of modern botany. But to do this rightly, I must review and amplify some of my former classification, which it will be advisable to do in a separate chapter.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VI.

MONACHA.

1. It is not a little vexing to me, in looking over the very little I have got done of my planned Systema Proserpinae, to discover a grave mistake in the specifications of Veronica. It is Veronica chamaedrys, not officinalis, which is our proper English Speedwell, and Welsh Fluellen; and all the eighth paragraph, p. 74, properly applies to that. Veronica officinalis is an extremely small flower rising on vertical stems out of recumbent leaves; and the drawing of it in the Flora Danica, which I mistook for a stunted northern state, is quite true of the English species,[32] except that it does not express the recumbent action of the leaves. The proper representation of ground-leafage has never yet been attempted in any botanical work whatever, and as, in recumbent plants, their grouping and action can only be seen from above, the plates of them should always have a dark and rugged background, not only to indicate the position of the eye, but to relieve the forms of the leaves as they were intended to be shown. I will try to give some examples in the course of this year.

2. I find also, sorrowfully, that the references are wrong in three, if not more, places in that chapter. S. 971 and 972 should be transposed in p. 72. S. 294 in p. 74 should be 984. D. 407 should be inserted after Peregrina, in p. 76; and 203, in fourth line from bottom of p. 78, should be 903. I wish it were likely that these errors had been corrected by my readers,—the rarity of the Flora Danica making at present my references virtually useless: but I hope in time that our public institutes will possess themselves of copies: still more do I hope that some book of the kind will be undertaken by English artists and engravers, which shall be worthy of our own country.

3. Farther, I get into confusion by not always remembering my own nomenclature, and have allowed 'Gentianoides' to remain, for No. 16, though I banish Gentian. It will be far better to call this eastern mountain species 'Olympica': according to Sibthorpe's localization, "in summa parte, nive soluta, montis Olympi Bithyni," and the rather that Curtis's plate above referred to shows it in luxuriance to be liker an asphodel than a gentian.

4. I have also perhaps done wrong in considering Veronica polita and agrestis as only varieties, in No. 3. No author tells me why the first is called polite, but its blue seems more intense than that of agrestis; and as it is above described with attention, vol. i., p. 75, as an example of precision in flower-form, we may as well retain it in our list here. It will be therefore our twenty-first variety,—it is Loudon's fifty-ninth and last. He translates 'polita' simply 'polished,' which is nonsense. I can think of nothing to call it but 'dainty,' and will leave it at present unchristened.

5. Lastly. I can't think why I omitted V. Humifusa, S. 979, which seems to be quite one of the most beautiful of the family—a mountain flower also, and one which I ought to find here; but hitherto I know only among the mantlings of the ground, V. thymifolia and officinalis. All these, however, agree in the extreme prettiness and grace of their crowded leafage,—the officinalis, of which the leaves are shown much too coarsely serrated in S. 984, forming carpets of finished embroidery which I have never yet rightly examined, because I mistook them for St. John's wort. They are of a beautiful pointed oval form, serrated so finely that they seem smooth in distant effect, and covered with equally invisible hairs, which seem to collect towards the edge in the variety Hirsuta, S. 985.

For the present, I should like the reader to group the three flowers, S. 979, 984, 985, under the general name of Humifusa, and to distinguish them by a third epithet, which I allow myself when in difficulties, thus:

V. Humifusa, caerulea, the beautiful blue one, which resembles Spicata. V. Humifusa, officinalis, and, V. Humifusa, hirsuta: the last seems to me extremely interesting, and I hope to find it and study it carefully.

By this arrangement we shall have only twenty-one species to remember: the one which chiefly decorates the ground again dividing into the above three.

6. These matters being set right, I pass to the business in hand, which is to define as far as possible the subtle relations between the Veronicas and Draconidae, and again between these and the tribe at present called labiate. In my classification above, vol. i, p. 200, the Draconidae include the Nightshades; but this was an oversight. Atropa belongs properly to the following class, Moiridae; and my Draconids are intended to include only the two great families of Personate and Ringent flowers, which in some degree resemble the head of an animal: the representative one being what we call 'snapdragon,' but the French, careless of its snapping power, 'calf's muzzle'—"Muflier, muflande, or muffle de Veau."—Rousseau, 'Lettres,' p. 19.

7. As I examine his careful and sensible plates of it, I chance also on a bit of his text, which, extremely wise and generally useful, I translate forthwith:—

"I understand, my dear, that one is vexed to take so much trouble without learning the names of the plants one examines; but I confess to you in good faith that it never entered into my plan to spare you this little chagrin. One pretends that Botany is nothing but a science of words, which only exercises the memory, and only teaches how to give plants names. For me, I know no rational study which is only a science of words: and to which of the two, I pray you, shall I grant the name of botanist,—to him who knows how to spit out a name or a phrase at the sight of a plant, without knowing anything of its structure, or to him who, knowing that structure very well, is ignorant nevertheless of the very arbitrary name that one gives to the plant in such and such a country? If we only gave to your children an amusing occupation, we should miss the best half of our purpose, which is, in amusing them, to exercise their intelligence and accustom them to attention. Before teaching them to name what they see, let us begin by teaching them to see it. That science, forgotten in all educations, ought to form the most important part of theirs. I can never repeat it often enough—teach them never to be satisfied with words, ('se payer de mots') and to hold themselves as knowing nothing of what has reached no farther than their memories."

8. Rousseau chooses, to represent his 'Personees,' La Mufflaude, la Linaire, l'Euphraise, la Pediculaire, la Crete-de-coq, l'Orobanche, la Cimbalaire, la Velvote, la Digitale, giving plates of snapdragon, foxglove, and Madonna-herb, (the Cimbalaire), and therefore including my entire class of Draconidae, whether open or close throated. But I propose myself to separate from them the flower which, for the present, I have called Monacha, but may perhaps find hereafter a better name; this one, which is the best Latin I can find for a nun of the desert, being given to it because all the resemblance either to calf or dragon has ceased in its rosy petals, and they resemble—the lower ones those of the mountain thyme, and the upper one a softly crimson cowl or hood.

9. This beautiful mountain flower, at present, by the good grace of botanists, known as Pedicularis, from a disease which it is supposed to give to sheep, is distinguished from all other Draconidae by its beautifully divided leaves: while the flower itself, like, as aforesaid, thyme in the three lower petals, rises in the upper one quite upright, and terminates in the narrow and peculiar hood from which I have named it 'Monacha.'

10. Two deeper crimson spots with white centres animate the colour of the lower petals in our mountain kind—-mountain or morass;—it is vilely drawn in S. 997 under the name of Sylvatica, translated 'Procumbent'! As it is neither a wood flower nor a procumbent one,[33] and as its rosy colour is rare among morass flowers, I shall call it simply Monacha Rosea.

I have not the smallest notion of the meaning of the following sentence in S.:—"Upper lip of corolla not rostrate, with the margin on each side furnished with a triangular tooth immediately below the apex, but without any tooth below the middle." Why, or when, a lip is rostrate, or has any 'tooth below the middle,' I do not know; but the upper petal of the corolla is here a very close gathered hood, with the style emergent downwards, and the stamens all hidden and close set within.

In this action of the upper petal, and curve of the style, the flower resembles the Labiates,[34] and is the proper link between them and the Draconidae. The capsule is said by S. to be oval-ovoid. As eggs always are oval, I don't feel farther informed by the epithet. The capsule and seed both are of entirely indescribable shapes, with any number of sides—very foxglove-like, and inordinately large. The seeds of the entire family are 'ovoid-subtrigonous.'—S.

11. I find only two species given as British by S., namely, Sylvatica and Palustris; but I take first for the Regina, the beautiful Arctic species D. 1105, Flora Suecica, 555. Rose-coloured in the stem, pale pink in the flowers (corollae pallide incarnatae), the calices furry against the cold, whence the present ugly name, Hirsuta. Only on the highest crests of the Lapland Alps.

(2) Rosea, D. 225, there called Sylvatica, as by S., presumably because "in pascuis subhumidis non rarae." Beautifully drawn, but, as I have described it, vigorously erect, and with no decumbency whatever in any part of it. Root branched, and enormous in proportion to plant, and I fancy therefore must be good for something if one knew it. But Gerarde, who calls the plant Red Rattle, (it having indeed much in common with the Yellow Rattle), says, "It groweth in moist and moorish meadows; the herbe is not only unprofitable, but likewise hurtful, and an infirmity of the meadows."

(3) Palustris, D. 2055, S. 996—scarcely any likeness between the plates. "Everywhere in the meadows," according to D. I leave the English name, Marsh Monacha, much doubting its being more marshy than others.

12. I take next (4 and 5) two northern species, Lapponica, D. 2, and Groenlandica, D. 1166; the first yellow, the second red, both beautiful. The Lap one has its divided leaves almost united into one lovely spear-shaped, single leaf. The Greenland one has its red hood much prolonged in front.

(6) Ramosa, also a Greenland species; yellow, very delicate and beautiful. Three stems from one root, but may be more or fewer, I suppose.

13. (7) Norvegica, a beautifully clustered golden flower, with thick stem. D. 30, the only locality given being the Dovrefeldt. "Alpina" and "Flammea" are the synonyms, but I do not know it on the Alps, and it is no more flame-coloured than a cowslip.

Both the Lapland and Norwegian flowers are drawn with their stems wavy, though upright—a rare and pretty habit of growth.

14. (8) Suecica, D. 26, named awkwardly Sceptrum Carolinum, in honour of Charles XII. It is the largest of all the species drawn in D., and contrasts strikingly with (4) and (5) in the strict uprightness of its stem. The corolla is closed at the extremity, which is red; the body of the flower pale yellow. Grows in marshy and shady woods, near Upsal. Linn., Flora Suecica, 553.

The many-lobed but united leaves, at the root five or six inches long, are irregularly beautiful.

15. These eight species are all I can specify, having no pictures of the others named by Loudon,—eleven, making nineteen altogether, and I wish I could find a twentieth and draw them all, but the reader may be well satisfied if he clearly know these eight. The group they form is an entirely distinct one, exactly intermediate between the Vestals and Draconids, and cannot be rightly attached to either; for it is Draconid in structure and affinity—Vestal in form—and I don't see how to get the connection of the three families rightly expressed without taking the Draconidae out of the groups belonging to the dark Kora, and placing them next the Vestals, with the Monachae between; for indeed Linaria and several other Draconid forms are entirely innocent and beautiful, and even the Foxglove never does any real mischief like hemlock, while decoratively it is one of the most precious of mountain flowers. I find myself also embarrassed by my name of Vestals, because of the masculine groups of Basil and Thymus, and I think it will be better to call them simply Menthae, and to place them with the other cottage-garden plants not yet classed, taking the easily remembered names Mentha, Monacha, Draconida. This will leave me a blank seventh place among my twelve orders at p. 194, vol. i., which I think I shall fill by taking cyclamen and anagillis out of the Primulaceae, and making a separate group of them. These retouchings and changes are inevitable in a work confessedly tentative and suggestive only; but in whatever state of imperfection I may be forced to leave 'Proserpina,' it will assuredly be found, up to the point reached, a better foundation for the knowledge of flowers in the minds of young people than any hitherto adopted system of nomenclature.

16. Taking then this re-arranged group, Mentha, Monacha, and Draconida, as a sufficiently natural and convenient one, I will briefly give the essentially botanical relations of the three families.

Mentha and Monacha agree in being essentially hooded flowers, the upper petal more or less taking the form of a cup, helmet or hood, which conceals the tops of the stamens. Of the three lower petals, the lowest is almost invariably the longest; it sometimes is itself divided again into two, but may be best thought of as single, and with the two lateral ones, distinguished in the Menthae as the apron and the side pockets.

Plate XII. represents the most characteristic types of the blossoms of Menthae, in the profile and front views, all a little magnified. The upper two are white basil, purple spotted—growing here at Brantwood always with two terminal flowers. The two middle figures are the purple-spotted dead nettle, Lamium maculatum; and the two lower, thyme: but I have not been able to draw these as I wanted, the perspectives of the petals being too difficult, and inexplicable to the eye even in the flowers themselves without continually putting them in changed positions.

17. The Menthae are in their structure essentially quadrate plants; their stems are square, their leaves opposite, their stamens either four or two, their seeds two-carpeled. But their calices are five-sepaled, falling into divisions of two and three; and the flowers, though essentially four-petaled, may divide either the upper or lower petal, or both, into two lobes, and so present a six-lobed outline. The entire plants, but chiefly the leaves, are nearly always fragrant, and always innocent. None of them sting, none prick, and none poison.

18. The Draconids, easily recognizable by their aspect, are botanically indefinable with any clearness or simplicity. The calyx may be five- or four-sepaled; the corolla, five- or four-lobed; the stamens may be two, four, four with a rudimentary fifth, or five with the two anterior ones longer than the other three! The capsule may open by two, three, or four valves,—or by pores; the seeds, generally numerous, are sometimes solitary, and the leaves may be alternate, opposite, or verticillate.

19. Thus licentious in structure, they are also doubtful in disposition. None that I know of are fragrant, few useful, many more or less malignant, and some parasitic. The following piece of a friend's letter almost makes me regret my rescue of them from the dark kingdom of Kora:—

"... And I find that the Monacha Rosea (Red Rattle is its name, besides the ugly one) is a perennial, and several of the other draconidae, foxglove, etc., are biennials, born this year, flowering and dying next year, and the size of roots is generally proportioned to the life of plants; except when artificial cultivation develops the root specially, as in turnips, etc. Several of the Draconidae are parasites, and suck the roots of other plants, and have only just enough of their own to catch with. The Yellow Rattle is one; it clings to the roots of the grasses and clovers, and no cultivation will make it thrive without them. My authority for this last fact is Grant Allen; but I have observed for myself that the Yellow Rattle has very small white sucking roots, and no earth sticking to them. The toothworts and broom rapes are Draconidae, I think, and wholly parasites. Can it be that the Red Rattle is the one member of the family that has 'proper pride, and is self supporting'? the others are mendicant orders. We had what we choose to call the Dorcas flower show yesterday, and we gave, as usual, prizes for wild flower bouquets. I tried to find out the local names of several flowers, but they all seemed to be called 'I don't know, ma'am.' I would not allow this name to suffice for the red poppy, and I said 'This red flower must be called something—tell me what you call it?' A few of the audience answered 'Blind Eyes.' Is it because they have to do with sleep that they are called Blind Eyes—or because they are dazzling?"

20. I think, certainly, from the dazzling, which sometimes with the poppy, scarlet geranium, and nasturtium, is more distinctly oppressive to the eye than a real excess of light.

I will certainly not include among my rescued Draconidae, the parasitic Lathraea and Orobanche; and cannot yet make certain of any minor classification among those which I retain,—but, uniting Bartsia with Euphrasia, I shall have, in the main, the three divisions Digitalis, Linaria, Euphrasia, and probably separate the moneyworts as links with Veronica, and Rhinanthus as links with Lathraea.

And as I shall certainly be unable this summer, under the pressure of resumed work at Oxford, to spend time in any new botanical investigations, I will rather try to fulfil the promise given in the last number, to collect what little I have been able hitherto to describe or ascertain, respecting the higher modes of tree structure.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII.

SCIENCE IN HER CELLS.

[The following chapter has been written six years. It was delayed in order to complete the promised clearer analysis of stem-structure; which, after a great deal of chopping, chipping, and peeling of my oaks and birches, came to reverently hopeless pause. What is here done may yet have some use in pointing out to younger students how they may simplify their language, and direct their thoughts, so as to attain, in due time, to reverent hope.]

1. The most generally useful book, to myself, hitherto, in such little time as I have for reading about plants, has been Lindley's 'Ladies' Botany'; but the most rich and true I have yet found in illustration, the 'Histoire des Plantes,'[35] by Louis Figuier. I should like those of my readers who can afford it to buy both these books; the first named, at any rate, as I shall always refer to it for structural drawings, and on points of doubtful classification; while the second contains much general knowledge, expressed with some really human intelligence and feeling; besides some good and singularly just history of botanical discovery and the men who guided it. The botanists, indeed, tell me proudly, "Figuier is no authority." But who wants authority! Is there nothing known yet about plants, then, which can be taught to a boy or girl, without referring them to an 'authority'?

I, for my own part, care only to gather what Figuier can teach concerning things visible, to any boy or girl, who live within reach of a bramble hedge, or a hawthorn thicket, and can find authority enough for what they are told, in the sticks of them.

2. If only he would, or could, tell us clearly that much; but like other doctors, though with better meaning than most, he has learned mainly to look at things with a microscope,—rarely with his eyes. And I am sorry to see, on re-reading this chapter of my own, which is little more than an endeavour to analyze and arrange the statements contained in his second, that I have done it more petulantly and unkindly than I ought; but I can't do all the work over again, now,—more's the pity. I have not looked at this chapter for a year, and shall be sixty before I know where I am;—(I find myself, instead, now, sixty-four!)

3. But I stand at once partly corrected in this second chapter of Figuier's, on the 'Tige,' French from the Latin 'Tignum,' which 'authorities' say is again from the Sanscrit, and means 'the thing hewn with an axe'; anyhow it is modern French for what we are to call the stem (Sec. 12, p. 136).

"The tige," then, begins M. Louis, "is the axis of the ascending system of a vegetable, and it is garnished at intervals with vital knots, (eyes,) from which spring leaves and buds, disposed in a perfectly regular order. The root presents nothing of the kind. This character permits us always to distinguish, in the vegetable axis, what belongs really to the stem, and what to the root."

4. Yes; and that is partly a new idea to me, for in this power of assigning their order for the leaves, the stem seems to take a royal or commandant character, and cannot be merely defined as the connexion of the leaf with the roots.

In it is put the spirit of determination. One cannot fancy the little leaf, as it is born, determining the point it will be born at: the governing stem must determine that for it. Also the disorderliness of the root is to be noted for a condition of its degradation, no less than its love, and need, of Darkness.

Nor was I quite right (above, Sec. 15, p. 139) in calling the stem itself 'spiral': it is itself a straight-growing rod, but one which, as it grows, lays the buds of future leaves round it in a spiral order, like the bas-relief on Trajan's column.

I go on with Figuier: the next passage is very valuable.

5. "The tige is the part of plants which, directed into the air, supports, and gives growing power to, the branches, the twigs, the leaves, and the flowers. The form, strength, and direction of the tige depend on the part that each plant has to play among the vast vegetable population of our globe. Plants which need for their life a pure and often-renewed air, are borne by a straight tige, robust and tall. When they have need only of a moist air, more condensed, and more rarely renewed, when they have to creep on the ground or glide in thickets, the tiges are long, flexible, and dragging. If they are to float in the air, sustaining themselves on more robust vegetables, they are provided with flexible, slender, and supple tiges."

6. Yes; but in that last sentence he loses hold of his main idea, and to me the important one,—namely, the connexion of the form of stem with the quality of the air it requires. And that idea itself is at present vague, though most valuable, to me. A strawberry creeps, with a flexible stem, but requires certainly no less pure air than a wood-fungus, which stands up straight. And in our own hedges and woods, are the wild rose and honeysuckle signs of unwholesome air?

"And honeysuckle loved to crawl Up the lone crags and ruined wall. I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade The sun in all his round surveyed."

It seems to me, in the nooks most haunted by honeysuckle in my own wood, that the reason for its twining is a very feminine one,—that it likes to twine; and that all these whys and wherefores resolve themselves at last into—what a modern philosopher, of course, cannot understand—caprice.[36]

7. Farther on, Figuier, quoting St. Hilaire, tells us, of the creepers in primitive forests,—"Some of them resemble waving ribands, others coil themselves and describe vast spirals; they droop in festoons, they wind hither and thither among the trees, they fling themselves from one to another, and form masses of leaves and flowers in which the observer is often at a loss to discover on which plant each several blossom grows."

For all this, the real reasons will be known only when human beings become reasonable. For, except a curious naturalist or wistful missionary, no Christian has trodden the labyrinths of delight and decay among these garlands, but men who had no other thought than how to cheat their savage people out of their gold, and give them gin and smallpox in exchange. But, so soon as true servants of Heaven shall enter these Edens, and the Spirit of God enter with them, another spirit will also be breathed into the physical air; and the stinging insect, and venomous snake, and poisonous tree, pass away before the power of the regenerate human soul.

8. At length, on the structure of the tige, Figuier begins his real work, thus:—-

"A glance of the eye, thrown on the section of a log of wood destined for warming, permits us to recognize that the tige of the trees of our forests presents three essential parts, which are, in going from within to without, the pith, the wood, and the bark. The pith, (in French, marrow,) forms a sort of column in the centre of the woody axis. In very thick and old stems its diameter appears very little; and it has even for a long time been supposed that the marrow ends by disappearing altogether from the stems of old trees. But it does nothing of the sort;[37] and it is now ascertained, by exact measures, that its diameter remains sensibly invariable[38] from the moment when the young woody axis begins to consolidate itself, to the epoch of its most complete development."

So far, so good; but what does he mean by the complete development of the young woody axis? When does the axis become 'wooden,' and how far up the tree does he call it an axis? If the stem divides into three branches, which is the axis? And is the pith in the trunk no thicker than in each branch?

9. He proceeds to tell us, "The marrow is formed by a reunion of cells."—Yes, and so is Newgate, and so was the Bastille. But what does it matter whether the marrow is made of a reunion of cells, or cellars, or walls, or floors, or ceilings? I want to know what's the use of it? why doesn't it grow bigger with the rest of the tree? when does the tree 'consolidate itself'? when is it finally consolidated? and how can there be always marrow in it when the weary frame of its age remains a mere scarred tower of war with the elements, full of dust and bats?



'He will tell you if only you go on patiently,' thinks the reader. He will not! Once your modern botanist gets into cells, he stays in them. Hear how he goes on!—"This cell is a sort of sack; this sack is completely closed; sometimes it is empty, sometimes it"—is full?—no, that would be unscientific simplicity: sometimes it "conceals a matter in its interior." "The marrow of young trees, such as it is represented in Figure 24 (Figuier, Figs. 38, 39, p. 42), is nothing else"—(indeed!)—"than an aggregation of cells, which, first of spherical form, have become polyhedric by their increase and mutual compression."

10. Now these figures, 38 and 39, which profess to represent this change, show us sixteen oval cells, such as at A, (Fig. 24) enlarged into thirteen larger, and flattish, hexagons!—B, placed at a totally different angle.

And before I can give you the figure revised with any available accuracy, I must know why or how the cells are enlarged, and in what direction.

Do their walls lengthen laterally when they are empty, or does the 'matiere' inside stuff them more out, (itself increased from what sources?) when they are full? In either case, during this change from circle to hexagon, is the marrow getting thicker without getting longer? If so, the change in the angle of the cells is intentional, and probably is so; but the number of cells should have been the same: and further, the term 'hexagonal' can only be applied to the section of a tubular cell, as in honeycomb, so that the floor and ceiling of our pith cell are left undescribed.

11. Having got thus much of (partly conjectural) idea of the mechanical structure of marrow, here follows the solitary vital, or mortal, fact in the whole business, given in one crushing sentence at the close:—-

"The medullary tissue" (first time of using this fine phrase for the marrow,—why can't he say marrowy tissue—'tissue moelleuse'?) "appears very early struck with atony," ('atonic,' want of tone,) "above all, in its central parts." And so ends all he has to say for the present about the marrow! and it never appears to occur to him for a moment, that if indeed the noblest trees live all their lives in a state of healthy and robust paralysis, it is a distinction, hitherto unheard of, between vegetables and animals!

12. Two pages farther on, however, (p. 45,) we get more about the marrow, and of great interest,—to this effect, for I must abstract and complete here, instead of translating.

"The marrow itself is surrounded, as the centre of an electric cable is, by its guarding threads—that is to say, by a number of cords or threads coming between it and the wood, and differing from all others in the tree.

"The entire protecting cylinder composed of them has been called the 'etui,' (or needle-case,) of the marrow. But each of the cords which together form this etui, is itself composed of an almost infinitely delicate thread twisted into a screw, like the common spring of a letter-weigher or a Jack-in-the-box, but of exquisite fineness." Upon this, two pages and an elaborate figure are given to these 'trachees'—tracheas, the French call them,—and we are never told the measure of them, either in diameter or length,[39] and still less, the use of them!

I collect, however, in my thoughts, what I have learned thus far.

13. A tree stem, it seems, is a growing thing, cracked outside, because its skin won't stretch, paralysed inside, because its marrow won't grow, but which continues the process of its life somehow, by knitted nerves without any nervous energy in them, protected by spiral springs without any spring in them.

Stay—I am going too fast. That coiling is perhaps prepared for some kind of uncoiling; and I will try if I can't learn something about it from some other book—noticing, as I pause to think where to look, the advantage of our English tongue in its pithy Saxon word, 'pith,' separating all our ideas of vegetable structure clearly from animal; while the poor Latin and French must use the entirely inaccurate words 'medulla' and 'moelle'; all, however, concurring in their recognition of a vital power of some essential kind in this white cord of cells: "Medulla, sive illa vitalis anima est, ante se tendit, longitudinem impellens." (Pliny, 'Of the Vine,' liber X., cap. xxi.) 'Vitalis anima'—yes—that I accept; but 'longitudinem impellens,' I pause at; being not at all clear, yet, myself, about any impulsive power in the pith.[40]

14. However, I take up first, and with best hope, Dr. Asa Gray, who tells me (Art. 211) that pith consists of parenchyma, 'which is at first gorged with sap,' but that many stems expand so rapidly that their pith is torn into a mere lining or into horizontal plates; and that as the stem grows older, the pith becomes dry and light, and is 'then of no farther use to the plant.' But of what use it ever was, we are not informed; and the Doctor makes us his bow, so far as the professed article on pith goes; but, farther on, I find in his account of 'Sap-wood,' (Art. 224.) that in the germinating plantlet, the sap 'ascends first through the parenchyma, especially through its central portion or pith.' Whereby we are led back to our old question, what sap is, and where it comes from, with the now superadded question, whether the young pith is a mere succulent sponge, or an active power, and constructive mechanism, nourished by the abundant sap: as Columella has it,—

"Naturali enim spiritu omne alimentum virentis quasi quaedam anima, per medullam trunci veluti per siphonem, trahitur in summum."[41]

As none of these authors make any mention of a communication between the cells of the pith, I conclude that the sap they are filled with is taken up by them, and used to construct their own thickening tissue.

15. Next, I take Balfour's 'Structural Botany,' and by his index, under the word 'Pith,' am referred to his articles 8, 72, and 75. In article 8, neither the word pith, nor any expression alluding to it, occurs.

In article 72, the stem of an outlaid tree is defined as consisting of 'pith, fibro-vascular and [42] woody tissue, medullary rays, bark, and epidermis.'

A more detailed statement follows, illustrated by a figure surrounded by twenty-three letters—namely, two b s, three c s, four e s, three f s, one l, four m s, three p s, one r, and two v s.

Eighteen or twenty minute sputters of dots may, with a good lens, be discerned to proceed from this alphabet, and to stop at various points, or lose themselves in the texture, of the represented wood. And, knowing now something of the matter beforehand, guessing a little more, and gleaning the rest with my finest glass, I achieve the elucidation of the figure, to the following extent, explicable without letters at all, by my more simple drawing, Figure 25.

16. (1) The inner circle full of little cells, diminishing in size towards the outside, represents the pith, 'very large at this period of the growth'—(the first year, we are told in next page,) and 'very large'—he means in proportion to the rest of the branch. How large he does not say, in his text, but states, in his note, that the figure is magnified 26 diameters. I have drawn mine by the more convenient multiplier of 30, and given the real size at B, according to Balfour:—but without believing him to be right. I never saw a maple stem of the first year so small.



(2) The black band with white dots round the marrow, represents the marrow-sheath.

(3) From the marrow-sheath run the marrow-rays 'dividing the vascular circle into numerous compact segments.' A 'ray' cannot divide anything into a segment. Only a partition, or a knife, can do that. But we shall find presently that marrow rays ought to be called marrow-plates, and are really mural, forming more or less continuous partitions.

(4) The compact segments 'consist of woody vessels and of porous vessels.' This is the first we have heard of woody vessels! He means the 'fibres ligneux' of Figuier; and represents them in each compartment, as at C (Fig. 25). without telling us why he draws the woody vessels as radiating. They appear to radiate, indeed, when wood is sawn across, but they are really upright.

(5) A moist layer of greenish cellular tissue called the cambium layer—black in Figure 25—and he draws it in flat arches, without saying why.

(6), (7), (8) Three layers of bark (called in his note Endophloeum; Mesophloeum, and Epiphloeum!) with 'laticiferous vessels.' [43]

(9) Epidermis. The three layers of bark being separated by single lines, I indicate the epidermis by a double one, with a rough fringe outside, and thus we have the parts of the section clearly visible and distinct for discussion, so far as this first figure goes,—without wanting one letter of all his three and twenty!

17. But on the next page, this ingenious author gives us a new figure, which professes to represent the same order of things in a longitudinal section; and in retracing that order sideways, instead of looking down, he not only introduces new terms, but misses one of his old layers in doing so,—thus:

His order, in explaining Figure 96, contains, as above, nine members of the tree stem.

But his order, in explaining Figure 97, contains only eight, thus:

(1) The pith. (2) Medullary sheath. Circles.

(3) Medullary ray = a Radius.

(4) Vascular zone, with woody fibres (not now vessels!) The fibres are composed of spiral, annular, pitted, and other vessels.

(5) Inner bark or 'liber,' with layer of cambium cells.

(6) Second layer of bark, or 'cellular envelope,' with laticiferous vessels.

(7) Outer or tuberous layer of bark.

(8) Epidermis.

Doing the best I can to get at the muddle-headed gentleman's meaning, it appears, by the lettering of his Figure 97, my 25 above, that the 'liber,' number 5, contains the cambium layer in the middle of it. The part of the liber between the cambium and the wood is not marked in Figure 96;—but the cambium is number 5, and the liber outside of it is number 6,—the Endophloeum of his note.



Having got himself into this piece of lovely confusion, he proceeds to give a figure of the wood in the second year, which I think he has borrowed, without acknowledgment, from Figuier, omitting a piece of Figuier's woodcut which is unexplained in Figuier's text. I will spare my readers the work I have had to do, in order to get the statements on either side clarified: but I think they will find, if they care to work through the wilderness of the two authors' wits, that this which follows is the sum of what they have effectively to tell us; with the collated list of the main questions they leave unanswered—and, worse, unasked.

18. An ordinary tree branch, in transverse section, consists essentially of three parts only,—the Pith, Wood, and Bark.

The pith is in full animation during the first year—that is to say, during the actual shooting of the wood. We are left to infer that in the second year, the pith of the then unprogressive shoot becomes collective only, not formative; and that the pith of the new shoot virtually energizes the new wood in its deposition beside the old one. Thus, let a b, Figure 26, be a shoot of the first year, and b c of the second. The pith remains of the same thickness in both, but that of the new shoot is, I suppose, chiefly active in sending down the new wood to thicken the old one, which is collected, however, and fastened by the extending pith-rays below. You see, I have given each shoot four fibres of wood for its own; then the four fibres of the upper one send out two to thicken the lower: the pith-rays, represented by the white transverse claws, catch and gather all together. Mind, I certify nothing of this to you; but if this do not happen,—let the botanists tell you what does.

19. Secondly. The wood, represented by these four lines, is to be always remembered as consisting of fibres and vessels; therefore it is called 'vascular,' a word which you may as well remember (though rarely needed in familiar English), with its roots, vas, a vase, and vasculum, a little vase or phial. 'Vascule' may sometimes be allowed in botanical descriptions where 'cell' is not clear enough; thus, at present, we find our botanists calling the pith 'cellular' but the wood 'vascular,' with, I think, the implied meaning that a 'vascule,' little or large, is a long thing, and has some liquid in it, while a 'cell' is a more or less round thing, and to be supposed empty, unless described as full. But what liquid fills the vascules of the wood, they do not tell us.[44] I assume that they absorb water, as long as the tree lives.



20. Wood, whether vascular or fibrous, is however formed, in outlaid plants, first outside of the pith, and then, in shoots of the second year, outside of the wood of the first, and in the third year, outside of the wood of the second; so that supposing the quantity of wood sent down from the growing shoot distributed on a flat plane, the structure in the third year would be as in Figure 27. But since the new wood is distributed all round the stem, (in successive cords or threads, if not at once), the increase of substance after a year or two would be untraceable, unless more shoots than one were formed at the extremity of the branch. Of actual bud and branch structure, I gave introductory account long since in the fifth volume of 'Modern Painters.'[45] to which I would now refer the reader; but both then, and to-day, after twenty years' further time allowed me, I am unable to give the least explanation of the mode in which the wood is really added to the interior stem. I cannot find, even, whether this is mainly done in springtime, or in the summer and autumn, when the young suckers form on the wood; but my impression is that though all the several substances are added annually, a little more pith going to the edges of the pith-plates, and a little more bark to the bark, with a great deal more wood to the wood,—there is a different or at least successive period for each deposit, the carrying all these elements to their places involving a fineness of basket work or web work in the vessels, which neither microscope nor dissecting tool can disentangle. The result on the whole, however, is practically that we have, outside the wood, always a mysterious 'cambium layer,' and then some distinctions in the bark itself, of which we must take separate notice.

21. Of Cambium, Dr. Gray's 220th article gives the following account. "It is not a distinct substance, but a layer of delicate new cells full of sap. The inner portion of the cambium layer is, therefore, nascent wood, and the outer nascent bark. As the cells of this layer multiply, the greater number lengthen vertically into prosenchyma, or woody tissue, while some are transformed into ducts" (wood vessels?) "and others remaining as parenchyma, continue the medullary rays, or commence new ones." Nothing is said here of the part of the cambium which becomes bark: but at page 128, the thin walled cells of the bark are said to be those of ordinary 'parenchyma,' and in the next page a very important passage occurs, which must have a paragraph to itself. I close the present one with one more protest against the entirely absurd terms 'par-enchyma,' for common cellular tissue, 'pros-enchyma,' for cellular tissue with longer cells;—'cambium' for an early state of both, and 'diachyma' for a peculiar position of one![46] while the chemistry of all these substances is wholly neglected, and we have no idea given us of any difference in pith, wood, and bark, than that they are made of short or long—young or old—cells!

22. But in Dr. Gray's 230th article comes this passage of real value. (Italics mine—all.) "While the newer layers of the wood abound in crude sap, which they convey to the leaves, those of the inner bark abound in elaborated sap, which they receive from the leaves, and convey to the cambium layer, or zone of growth. The proper juices and peculiar products of plants are accordingly found in the foliage and bark, especially the latter. In the bark, therefore, either of the stem or root, medicinal and other principles are usually to be sought, rather than in the wood. Nevertheless, as the wood is kept in connection with the bark by the medullary rays, many products which probably originate in the former are deposited in the wood."

23. Now, at last, I see my way to useful summary of the whole, which I had better give in a separate chapter: and will try in future to do the preliminary work of elaboration of the sap from my authorities, above shown, in its process, to the reader, without making so much fuss about it. But, I think in this case, it was desirable that the floods of pros-, par-, peri-, dia-, and circumlocution, through which one has to wade towards any emergent crag of fact in modern scientific books, should for once be seen in the wasteful tide of them; that so I might finally pray the younger students who feel, or remember, their disastrous sway, to cure themselves for ever of the fatal habit of imagining that they know more of anything after naming it unintelligibly, and thinking about it impudently, than they did by loving sight of its nameless being, and in wise confession of its boundless mystery.