Proserpina Volume II Part 6

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, -- 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 -- 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 embarra.s.sment 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 mult.i.tudes, 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 a.s.serted 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.suredly 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 ill.u.s.trated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fas.h.i.+oned and modern travel, representing, as the type of things pa.s.sed away, the outside pa.s.sengers 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-cla.s.s 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 n.o.blesse. 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 pa.s.sengers 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 b.u.mping 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 s.h.i.+vering, 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses 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-fas.h.i.+oned light two-horse carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quant.i.ty 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 d.i.c.kens 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, wors.h.i.+pped 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 a.s.sociating 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 rec.u.mbent cl.u.s.ters, trickling, sometimes almost gus.h.i.+ng through the gra.s.s, 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sociated 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 ta.s.selled and braided with fretwork of silver, never tarnished--or h.o.a.rfrost 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-flus.h.i.+ng 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-_flus.h.i.+ng_' 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 pa.s.sion, from that of the heaths, roses, or lilies, where the determined bracts or calicos a.s.sert 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-flus.h.i.+ng 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 princ.i.p.al 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 p.r.o.nunciation, 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 a.s.sociate 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 cl.u.s.ter 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. n.o.body 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 cla.s.sed 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 cl.u.s.ter--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 cla.s.ses 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 ill.u.s.trations of the light and shade of foreground leaves belonging to the n.o.bler 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 n.o.bly 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 surpa.s.s the effect of the plate.