330 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



mollusk. But he does not care very much for 

 such transitory beauty as that of leaves and flow- 

 ers, which cannot be worked up into a permanent 

 means of human decoration. Yet by accustom- 

 ing his eyes to feast on the bright hues of his 

 ochre-stained bow and his wampum-belt, he is 

 laying the foundation for far higher and more 

 discriminative aesthetic pleasures in later genera- 

 tions. The susceptibility to the pungent stimu- 

 lation of dispersed color which the savage derives 

 from his ante-human ancestors, he improves and 

 strengthens by exercise on his broad contrasts 

 of red and blue, and hands on in a more devel- 

 oped form to his semi-barbarous and civilized 

 descendants. 



Even savages, however, cannot fail to be 

 struck by the hues of flowers when they are very 

 large and very brilliant. The Malays, who re- 

 ported to Dr. Arnold their discovery of the first 

 liafflesia — the monstrous parasitical blossom of 

 Sumatra, a yard in diameter, which deceives in- 

 sects by its exact resemblance in smell and ap- 

 pearance to a piece of putrid meat — testified 

 their admiration by cries of " Come, come ! A 

 flower, big, beautiful, wonderful ! " Such masses 

 of blossom as we find on the lilac, the tulip-tree, 

 the rhododendron, and the hibiscus, must fix and 

 gratify the eye of the most callous savage. There 

 is scarcely a literature in the world, if it be but 

 the embryo songs of the South-Sea-Islanders, 

 which does not contain abundant mention of 

 flowers as beautiful objects, whose loveliness is 

 apparent even to those rude, poets and their bru- 

 tal audience. Though negro children never pluck 

 the road-side posies as our own little villagers do, 

 yet I have found it difficult to keep their hands 

 off the scarlet bunches of poinsettia, the crimson- 

 hearted foliage of caladium, and the purple sprays 

 of bougainvillia. Even among the unsophisti- 

 cated Admiralty-Islanders, the officers of the 

 Challenger found little garden-plots filled with a 

 wild profusion of red or yellow blossom. 



So with ourselves, the mere pleasure of color 

 enters largely into our love for the golden crocus, 

 the imperial tulip, and the joyous geranium. We 

 get a pleasant shock of varied stimulation from 

 a garden glowing with roses, peonies, fuchsias, 

 chrysanthemums, asters, dahlias, and Canterbu- 

 ry bells. We look with delight upon the hang- 

 ing masses of laburnum, the clustered wealth of 

 apple - blossom, the crimson glory of Virginia- 

 creeper, tinged by the first autumnal frost. I 

 do not say that we have here no higher emotion- 

 al and poetic sentiments, intermingled with the 

 simple delight of color in some inextricable way : 



on the contrary, I shall try to show hereafter 

 that such feelings inevitably complicate the anal- 

 ysis of our mental state in admiring a hyacinth, 

 a daffodil, or a gladiolus. But in spite of these 

 superadded emotional elements, I think the un- 

 mixed delight of pure color - stimulation must 

 count for a great deal. It is the most original 

 part of our pleasure in looking at a flower, and to 

 the last it remains the principal part in many cases. 



Among our English wild-flowers there are not 

 a few that challenge attention on the ground of 

 brilliancy and purity of hue alone, without tak- 

 ing into consideration other aesthetic advantages. 

 The dark purple of the fritillary and the lighter 

 shades of the foxglove would make them beauti- 

 ful even apart from the drooping, serpentine grace 

 of the one and the tall, clustered shaft on which 

 the other bears its dappled bells. The intense 

 yellow of the buttercup, the marsh marigold, and 

 the gorse, would extort our praise if it occurred 

 in any costly exotic. Clover, broom, lucerne, 

 poppies, cornflowers, thistles, dandelions, con- 

 volvulus, and heather, are all bright enough to 

 fix our eyes upon their lovely tints as we scan 

 the fields in which they grow. Each blossom 

 stands out as a little patch of pungent color in 

 the midst of the uniform background of green 

 which throws them up in strong relief. And so 

 the eyes of our village children are attracted 

 from one to another in succession (just as the 

 eyes of the bee, for whose guidance their fair 

 tints were first developed, are drawn on from 

 each to its neighbor), and their little hands are 

 soon filled with cowslips, and primroses, and 

 white-fringed daisies, like the one which I am 

 now holding in my palm, and which is to form 

 the text for our morning's discourse. 



Our daisy is not like some of these other 

 flowers, a gayly-decked, flaunting madam, in robe 

 of crimson and ornaments of gold. She has do 

 very fine colors and no very large mass of bloom 

 to unfold before our admiring gaze. And yet, I 

 suppose, there never was a flower about which so 

 much poetry has been written in books, and said 

 in love-making, and thought in the heart of man, 

 as this same humble, quiet little daisy. More- 

 over, since all poetry is only aesthetic feeling 

 crystallized into words, there must be some won- 

 derful potency in this tiny flower, little as it at- 

 tracts our eyes by its outer hues, or we should 

 not find its name so often in the pages of our 

 poets. But, before we go on to see what good 

 points it actually has, let us look briefly at those 

 which it has not, that we may thus more clearly 

 realize the problem before us. 



