WOODEN FLOW EL'S 65 



YYOODEX FLOWEBS 



By ORVILLE PAUL PHILLIPS, Ph D. 

 BERKELEY, CAL. 



/~\WING to the demand of the uneducated mind for any kind of a 

 ^S crude guess rather than an acknowledgment of ignorance, strange 

 stories often spring up around natural phenomena, attributing, in most 

 absurd ways, effects to causes which have no more connection than the 

 barnacles and geese of Gerarde. Especially is this true of the savage 

 who deifies everything beyond his knowledge and attributes to it influ- 

 ences for good or evil to himself, according to his first impressions of 

 them. Such stories often find credence in the minds of more enlight- 

 ened people upon the plea that ' the Indian lives so close to nature that 

 he can not be far wrong in his estimate of natural phenomena.' These 

 believers in the infallibility of the ' untutored races ' fail to remember 

 that the most superstitious person on earth is he who reads nature, as 

 does the savage, only by the awe-inspiring phenomena that have forced 

 themselves upon his attention most strongly by some accident, without 

 any reference whatever to cause and effect. Cases in point might be 

 cited from every stage in the life of native races, but the following will 

 serve as an example, and at the same time may clear up in the minds 

 of some as to what is the cause of the peculiar growths known as 

 ' wooden roses ' or ' wooden flowers,' they having frequently been de- 

 scribed to the writer by different botanists as ' fungi,' ' galls,' ' knots,' 

 ' disease swellings,' etc. 



Volcanoes have ever been looked upon with fear by native races and 

 the crater shunned as the doorway to the 'infernal regions.' Agua, 

 in Guatemala, had, however, been inactive for so long that when pe- 

 culiar forms of plant life, known nowhere else in the region, were 

 found near its summit, they were supposed in some way to be connected 

 through the extinct, though still feared crater, with the regions of fire 

 beneath. They were, therefore, called by the euphonious title of ' roses 

 of hell,' because they were believed to be the only flowers that grew in 

 the 'lower world' and, having escaped through the crater from that 

 region, were supposed to exist nowhere in the world except upon the 

 upper portion of the sloping sides of this volcano. 



Because of their supposed origin, these ' flowers ' were feared as 

 having great power for evil. They were supposed to be more poisonous 

 than anything upon earth, and any person coming within the influence 

 of their inodorous, though not unbeautiful, ' petals ' was marked for 

 sure destruction. 



VOL. LXIX. — 5. 



