Proserpina, Volume 2

CHAPTER II

PINGUICULA

(Written in early June, 1881.)

1. On the rocks of my little stream, where it runs, or leaps, through the moorland, the common Pinguicula is now in its perfectest beauty; and it is one of the offshoots of the violet tribe which I have to place in the minor collateral groups of Viola very soon, and must not put off looking at it till next year.

There are three varieties given in Sowerby: 1. Vulgaris, 2. Greater-flowered, and 3. Lusitanica, white, for the most part, pink, or 'carnea,' sometimes: but the proper colour of the family is violet, and the perfect form of the plant is the 'vulgar' one. The larger-flowered variety is feebler in colour, and ruder in form: the white Spanish one, however, is very lovely, as far as I can judge from Sowerby's (old Sowerby's) pretty drawing.

The 'frequent' one (I shall usually thus translate 'vulgaris'), is not by any means so 'frequent' as the Queen violet, being a true wild-country, and mostly Alpine, plant; and there is also a real 'Pinguicula Alpina,' which we have not in England, who might be the Regina, if the group were large enough to be reigned over: but it is better not to affect Royalty among these confused, intermediate, or dependent families.

2. In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has one stalk only, growing from the ground and you may pull all the leaves away from the base of it, and keep the flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous roots, half an inch long; looking as if bitten at the ends. Two flowers, characteristically,—three and four very often,—spring from the same root, in places where it grows luxuriantly; and luxuriant growth means that clusters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on the surface of a square yard of boggy ground, quite to its mind; but its real glory is in harder life, in the crannies of well-wetted rock.

3. What I have called 'stars' are irregular clusters of approximately, or tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, of very pale green,—they may be six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement, essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. Taken as a whole the plant is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the flower has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,—spurred, and five-petaled,¹¹ and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted—the calyx, of a dark soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five. Tearing away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell, seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an irregular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly like the wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.¹²

4. The calyx is of a dark soppy green, I said; like that of sugary preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it were, water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long in water. And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live there—not for its own sins, but for some Emperor Pansy's, far away in the garden,—in a partly boggish, partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;—something of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be truer of it than a piggish, the nest of it being indeed on the rock, or morassy rock-investiture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge.

5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon's Encyclopædia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley ('Ladies' Botany'), and Figuer, without being able to find the meaning of 'Lentibulariaceæ,' to which tribe the Pinguicula is said by them all (except Figuier) to belong. It may perhaps be in Sowerby:¹³ but these above-named treatises are precisely of the kind with which the ordinary scholar must be content: and in all of them he has to learn this long, worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed into classing together two orders naturally quite distinct, the Butterworts and the Bladderworts.

Whatever the name may mean—it is bad Latin. There is such a word as Lenticularis—there is no Lentibularis; and it must positively trouble us no longer.¹⁴

The Butterworts are a perfectly distinct group—whether small or large, always recognizable at a glance. Their proper Latin name will be Pinguicula, (plural Pinguiculæ,)—their English, Bog-Violet, or, more familiarly, Butterwort; and their French, as at present, Grassette.

The families to be remembered will be only five, namely,

1. Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group. As bog plants, Ireland may rightly claim the noblest of them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly, and not (I believe) with us. Their colour is, however, more broken and less characteristic than that of the following species.

2. Pinguicula Violacea: Violet-coloured Butterwort, (instead of 'vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.

3. Pinguicula Alpina: Alpine Butterwort, white and much smaller than either of the first two families; the spur especially small, according to D. 453. Much rarer, as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern Europe. "In Britain, known only upon the moors of Rosehaugh, Ross-shire, where the progress of cultivation seems likely soon to efface it." (Grindon.)

4. Pinguicula Pallida: Pale Butterwort. From Sowerby's drawing, (135, vol. iii,) it would appear to be the most delicate and lovely of all the group. The leaves, "like those of other species, but rather more delicate and pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much involute in the margin. Tube of the corolla, yellow, streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a pansy); the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima, No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end." (Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead, the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)

The pale one is commonly called 'Lusitanica,' but I find no direct notice of its Portuguese habitation. Sowerby's plant came from Blandford, Dorsetshire; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran, and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is found.

FIG. III.

5. Pinguicula Minima: Least Butterwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the scape of it being hairy. I have not yet got rid of this absurd word 'scape,' meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing out of a cluster of leaves on the ground. It is a bad corruption of 'sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is necessarily branched.¹⁵ In 'Proserpina,' when it is spoken of distinctively, it is called 'virgula' (see vol. i., pp. 146, 147, 151, 152). The hairs on the virgula are in this instance so minute, that even with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish plate: of which Fig. 3 is a rough translation into woodcut, to show the grace and mien of the little thing. The trine leaf cluster is characteristic, and the folding up of the leaf edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. Abundant in east of Finmark (Finland?), but always growing in marsh moss, (Sphagnum palustre).

6. I call it 'Minima' only, as the least of the five here named; without putting forward any claim for it to be the smallest pinguicula that ever was or will be. In such sense only, the epithets minima or maxima are to be understood when used in 'Proserpina': and so also, every statement and every principle is only to be understood as true or tenable, respecting the plants which the writer has seen, and which he is sure that the reader can easily see: liable to modification to any extent by wider experience; but better first learned securely within a narrow fence, and afterwards trained or fructified, along more complex trellises.

7. And indeed my readers—at least, my newly found readers—must note always that the only power which I claim for any of my books, is that of being right and true as far as they reach. None of them pretend to be Kosmoses;—none to be systems of Positivism or Negativism, on which the earth is in future to swing instead of on its old worn-out poles;—none of them to be works of genius;—none of them to be, more than all true work must be, pious;—and none to be, beyond the power of common people's eyes,¹⁶ ears, and noses, 'æsthetic.' They tell you that the world is so big, and can't be made bigger—that you yourself are also so big, and can't be made bigger, however you puff or bloat yourself; but that, on modern mental nourishment, you may very easily be made smaller. They tell you that two and two are four, that ginger is hot in the mouth, that roses are red, and smuts black. Not themselves assuming to be pious, they yet assure you that there is such a thing as piety in the world, and that it is wiser than impiety; and not themselves pretending to be works of genius, they yet assure you that there is such a thing as genius in the world, and that it is meant for the light and delight of the world.

8. Into these repetitions of remarks on my work, often made before, I have been led by an unlucky author who has just sent me his book, advising me that it is "neither critical nor sentimental" (he had better have said in plain English "without either judgment or feeling"), and in which nearly the first sentence I read is—"Solomon with all his acuteness was not wise enough to … etc., etc., etc." ('give the Jews the British constitution,' I believe the man means.) He is not a whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall,—or any lively London apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern Cockney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we grew older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, and struck harder.

9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but, of late, even every word I use, being alike inconceivable to the insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr. Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist—as far as it had any—was that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I found the word 'tribal' repeated about ten times in every page. Now, if 'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal; and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal conversation! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not separate races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman Tribes, political divisions; essentially Trine: and the whole force of the word Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral'; the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.

10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs, I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;—but this finally I repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English, of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and accurate, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.

11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the Butterwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered, do need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their companionship. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among them; but masses them under the general type of the frequent English one, described as the second kind of his promiscuous group of 'Sanicle,' "which Clusius calleth Pinguicula; not before his time remembered, hath sundry small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards the root and sharp towards the point, of a faint green colour, and bitter in taste; out of the middest whereof sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes white, and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fashioned like unto the common Monkshoods" (he means Larkspurs) "called Consolida Regalis, having the like spur or Lark's heel attached thereto." Then after describing a third kind of Sanicle—(Cortusa Mathioli, a large-leaved Alpine Primula,) he goes on: "These plants are strangers in England; their natural country is the alpish mountains of Helvetia. They grow in my garden, where they flourish exceedingly, except Butterwoort, which groweth in our English squally wet grounds,"—('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it nearly: "Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"—and note farther that the word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but the Arabic 'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:—the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squæla' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely have been made an adjective by Gerarde),—"and will not yield to any culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, in Westmerland; (West-mere-land you observe, not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, twelve miles from Lancaster, and by Harwoode in the same county near to Blackburn: ten miles from Preston, in Anderness, upon the bogs and marish ground, and in the boggie meadows about Bishop's-Hatfield, and also in the fens in the way to Wittles Meare" (Roger Wildrake's Squattlesea Mere?) "from Fendon, in Huntingdonshire." Where doubtless Cromwell ploughed it up, in his young days, pitilessly; and in nowise pausing, as Burns beside his fallen daisy.

12. Finally, however, I believe we may accept its English name of 'Butterwort' as true Yorkshire, the more enigmatic form of 'Pigwilly' preserving the tradition of the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin name, in Pigwilly bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. Gerarde draws the English variety as "Pinguicula sive Sanicula Eboracensis,—Butterwoort, or Yorkshire Sanicle;" and he adds: "The husbandmen's wives of Yorkshire do use to anoint the dugs of their kine with the fat and oilous juice of the herb Butterwort when they be bitten of any venomous worm, or chapped, rifted and hurt by any other means."

13. In Lapland it is put to much more certain use; "it is called Tätgrass, and the leaves are used by the inhabitants to make their 'tät miolk,' a preparation of milk in common use among them. Some fresh leaves are laid upon a filter, and milk, yet warm from the reindeer, is poured over them. After passing quickly through the filter, this is allowed to rest for one or two days until it becomes ascescent,¹⁷ when it is found not to have separated from the whey, and yet to have attained much greater tenacity and consistence than it would have done otherwise. The Laplanders and Swedes are said to be extremely fond of this milk, which when once made, it is not necessary to renew the use of the leaves, for we are told that a spoonful of it will turn another quantity of warm milk, and make it like the first."¹⁸ (Baxter, vol. iii., No. 209.)

14. In the same page, I find quoted Dr. Johnston's observation that "when specimens of this plant were somewhat rudely pulled up, the flower-stalk, previously erect, almost immediately began to bend itself backwards, and formed a more or less perfect segment of a circle; and so also, if a specimen is placed in the Botanic box, you will in a short time find that the leaves have curled themselves backwards, and now conceal the root by their revolution."

I have no doubt that this elastic and wiry action is partly connected with the plant's more or less predatory or fly-trap character, in which these curiously degraded plants are associated with Drosera. I separate them therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them to be a link between the Violets and the Droseraceæ, placing them, however, with the Cytherides, as a sub-family, for their beautiful colour, and because they are indeed a grace and delight in ground which, but for them, would be painfully and rudely desolate.

CHAPTER III

VERONICA

1. "The Corolla of the Foxglove," says Dr. Lindley, beginning his account of the tribe at page 195 of the first volume of his 'Ladies' Botany,' "is a large inflated body(!), with its throat spotted with rich purple, and its border divided obliquely into five very short lobes, of which the two upper are the smaller; its four stamens are of unequal length, and its style is divided into two lobes at the upper end. A number of long hairs cover the ovary, which contains two cells and a great quantity of ovules.

"This" (sc. information) "will show you what is the usual character of the Foxglove tribe; and you will find that all the other genera referred to it in books agree with it essentially, although they differ in subordinate points. It is chiefly (A) in the form of the corolla, (B) in the number of the stamens, (C) in the consistence of the rind of the fruit, (D) in its form, (E) in the number of the seeds it contains, and (F) in the manner in which the sepals are combined, that these differences consist."

2. The enumerative letters are of my insertion—otherwise the above sentence is, word for word, Dr. Lindley's,—and it seems to me an interesting and memorable one in the history of modern Botanical science. For it appears from the tenor of it, that in a scientific botanist's mind, six particulars, at least, in the character of a plant, are merely 'subordinate points,'—namely,

1. (F) The combination of its calyx,

2. (A) The shape of its corolla,

3. (B) The number of its stamens,

4. (D) The form of its fruit,

5. (C) The consistence of its shell,—and

6. (E) The number of seeds in it.

Abstracting, then, from the primary description, all the six inessential points, I find the three essential ones left are, that the style is divided into two lobes at the upper end, that a number of glandular hairs cover the ovary, and that this latter contains two cells.

3. None of which particulars concern any reasonable mortal, looking at a Foxglove, in the smallest degree. Whether hairs which he can't see are glandular or bristly,—whether the green knobs, which are left when the purple bells are gone, are divided into two lobes or two hundred,—and whether the style is split, like a snake's tongue, into two lobes, or like a rogue's, into any number—are merely matters of vulgar curiosity, which he needs a microscope to discover, and will lose a day of his life in discovering. But if any pretty young Proserpina, escaped from the Plutonic durance of London, and carried by the tubular process, which replaces Charon's boat, over the Lune at Lancaster, cares to come and walk on the Coniston hills in a summer morning, when the eyebright is out on the high fields, she may gather, with a little help from Brantwood garden, a bouquet of the entire Foxglove tribe in flower, as it is at present defined, and may see what they are like, altogether.

4. She shall gather: first, the Euphrasy, which makes the turf on the brow of the hill glitter as if with new-fallen manna; then, from one of the blue clusters on the top of the garden wall, the common bright blue Speedwell; and, from the garden bed beneath, a dark blue spire of Veronica spicata; then, at the nearest opening into the wood, a little foxglove in its first delight of shaking out its bells; then—what next does the Doctor say?—a snapdragon? we must go back into the garden for that—here is a goodly crimson one, but what the little speedwell will think of him for a relative I can't think!—a mullein?—that we must do without for the moment; a monkey flower?—that we will do without, altogether; a lady's slipper?—say rather a goblin's with the gout! but, such as the flower-cobbler has made it, here is one of the kind that people praise, out of the greenhouse,—and yet a figwort we must have, too; which I see on referring to Loudon, may be balm-leaved, hemp-leaved, tansy-leaved, nettle-leaved, wing-leaved, heart-leaved, ear-leaved, spear-leaved, or lyre-leaved. I think I can find a balm-leaved one, though I don't know what to make of it when I've got it, but it's called a 'Scorodonia' in Sowerby, and something very ugly besides;—I'll put a bit of Teucrium Scorodonia in, to finish: and now—how will my young Proserpina arrange her bouquet, and rank the family relations to their contentment?

5. She has only one kind of flowers—in her hand, as botanical classification stands at present; and whether the system be more rational, or in any human sense more scientific, which puts calceolaria and speedwell together,—and foxglove and euphrasy; and runs them on one side into the mints, and on the other into the nightshades;—naming them, meanwhile, some from diseases, some from vermin, some from blockheads, and the rest anyhow:—or the method I am pleading for, which teaches us, watchful of their seasonable return and chosen abiding places, to associate in our memory the flowers which truly resemble, or fondly companion, or, in time kept by the signs of Heaven, succeed, each other; and to name them in some historical connection with the loveliest fancies and most helpful faiths of the ancestral world—Proserpina be judge; with every maid that sets flowers on brow or breast—from Thule to Sicily.

6. We will unbind our bouquet, then, and putting all the rest of its flowers aside, examine the range and nature of the little blue cluster only.

And first—we have to note of it, that the plan of the blossom in all the kinds is the same; an irregular quatre-foil: and irregular quatrefoils are of extreme rarity in flower form. I don't myself know one, except the Veronica. The cruciform vegetables—the heaths, the olives, the lilacs, the little Tormentillas, and the poppies, are all perfectly symmetrical. Two of the petals, indeed, as a rule, are different from the other two, except in the heaths; and thus a distinctly crosslet form obtained, but always an equally balanced one: while in the Veronica, as in the Violet, the blossom always refers itself to a supposed place on the stalk with respect to the ground; and the upper petal is always the largest.

The supposed place is often very suppositious indeed—for clusters of the common veronicas, if luxuriant, throw their blossoms about anywhere. But the idea of an upper and lower petal is always kept in the flower's little mind.

7. In the second place, it is a quite open and flat quatrefoil—so separating itself from the belled quadrature of the heath, and the tubed and primrose-like quadrature of the cruciferæ; and, both as a quatrefoil, and as an open one, it is separated from the foxgloves and snapdragons, which are neither quatrefoils, nor open; but are cinqfoils shut up!

8. In the third place, open and flat though the flower be, it is monopetalous; all the four arms of the cross strictly becoming one in the centre; so that, though the blue foils look no less sharply separate than those of a buttercup or a cistus; and are so delicate that one expects them to fall from their stalk if we breathe too near,—do but lay hold of one,—and, at the touch, the entire blossom is lifted from its stalk, and may be laid, in perfect shape, on our paper before us, as easily as if it had been a nicely made-up blue bonnet, lifted off its stand by the milliner.

I pause here, to consider a little; because I find myself mixing up two characteristics which have nothing necessary in their relation;—namely, the unity of the blossom, and its coming easily off the stalk. The separate petals of the cistus and cherry fall as easily as the foxglove drops its bells;—on the other hand, there are monopetalous things that don't drop, but hold on like the convoluta,¹⁹ and make the rest of the tree sad for their dying. I do not see my way to any systematic noting of decadent or persistent corolla; but, in passing, we may thank the veronica for never allowing us to see how it fades,²⁰ and being always cheerful and lovely, while it is with us.

9. And for a farther specialty, I think we should take note of the purity and simplicity of its floral blue, not sprinkling itself with unwholesome sugar like a larkspur, nor varying into coppery or turquoise-like hue as the forget-me-not; but keeping itself as modest as a blue print, pale, in the most frequent kinds; but pure exceedingly; and rejoicing in fellowship with the grey of its native rocks. The palest of all I think it will be well to remember as Veronica Clara, the "Poor Clare" of Veronicas. I find this note on it in my diary,—

'The flower of an exquisite grey-white, like lichen, or shaded hoar-frost, or dead silver; making the long-weathered stones it grew upon perfect with a finished modesty of paleness, as if the flower could be blue, and would not, for their sake. Laying its fine small leaves along in embroidery, like Anagallis tenella,—indescribable in the tender feebleness of it—afterwards as it grew, dropping the little blossoms from the base of the spire, before the buds at the top had blown. Gathered, it was happy beside me, with a little water under a stone, and put out one pale blossom after another, day by day.'

10. Lastly, and for a high worthiness, in my estimate, note that it is wild, of the wildest, and proud in pure descent of race; submitting itself to no follies of the cur-breeding florist. Its species, though many resembling each other, are severally constant in aspect, and easily recognizable; and I have never seen it provoked to glare into any gigantic impudence at a flower show. Fortunately, perhaps, it is scentless, and so despised.

11. Before I attempt arranging its families, we must note that while the corolla itself is one of the most constant in form, and so distinct from all other blossoms that it may be always known at a glance; the leaves and habit of growth vary so greatly in families of different climates, and those born for special situations, moist or dry, and the like, that it is quite impossible to characterize Veronic, or Veronique, vegetation in general terms. One can say, comfortably, of a strawberry, that it is a creeper, without expecting at the next moment to see a steeple of strawberry blossoms rise to contradict us;—we can venture to say of a foxglove that it grows in a spire, without any danger of finding, farther on, a carpet of prostrate and entangling digitalis; and we may pronounce of a buttercup that it grows mostly in meadows, without fear of finding ourselves, at the edge of the next thicket, under the shadow of a buttercup-bush growing into valuable timber. But the Veronica reclines with the lowly,²¹ upon occasion, and aspires, with the proud; is here the pleased companion of the ground-ivies, and there the unrebuked rival of the larkspurs: on the rocks of Coniston it effaces itself almost into the film of a lichen; it pierces the snows of Iceland with the gentian: and in the Falkland Islands is a white-blossomed evergreen, of which botanists are in dispute whether it be Veronica or Olive.

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