452 THE UNIVERSE. 



vent us from making use of it for our wants and enjoy- 

 ments. 1 



Poetry has exhausted all its resources in telling of the 

 perfume and color of flowers. Nature has surpassed art, 

 and the pencil of Apelles and Rubens could not reproduce 

 them in all their magnificence. And yet one color, black, 

 is wanting, amid this multitude of varied tints. Some co- 

 rollas, such as those of certain Scabiosae, are, it is true, of a 

 sombre purple, but a perfect black is never seen in this 

 organ. 



One phenomenon occurs in respect to flowers which has 

 been a good deal talked about, namely, the mutability of 

 color which they exhibit. Pallas, when exploring the banks 

 of the Volga, remarked with astonishment that a species of 

 anemone, the Anemone ^atercs, sometimes bore white flow- 



1 Here and there in desolate spots in Southwest Africa grows one of the most 

 extraordinary plants in the world, the Welwitschia mirdbilis. It looks perhaps 

 almost as much like an immense red and green Polypus as anything. It has two 

 leaves, nine or ten feet long, and of a pale green color. Under the influence of 

 heat and drought these split up into ribbons. In the centre is a woody mass, with 

 a rough bark or cork-like surface, rising a foot or so above the ground, and bear- 

 ing round its edges, just within the insertion of the leaves, an assemblage of 

 small stems about six inches lon\ dividing into smaller branches, each of which 

 bears from three to five cones, three inches in length, and three quarters of an 

 inch thick, of an elongated oval form and crimson color, tinted with green in the 

 less developed specimens, and marked with scales like those of a fir-cone. The 

 leaves are so straight-grained that they can be torn from top to bottom without 

 deviating a single line from a straight course. Rain rarely or never falls where 

 this plant exists. The plant seems sometimes to attain a much greater size than 

 mentioned above, the leaves being two and even three fathoms long, and the apex 

 of the trunk, or rather, from the confused account given of it, the flower itself, 

 being six feet wide, and opening like two immense clam-shells, some eighteen 

 inches across. Science and Art, vol. i. Tr. 



