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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



delion ; but it just raises its pretty, simple head 

 in the midst of a level sward of close-cropped 

 grass. Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out how 

 nearly the tender feeling toward our children — 

 our little ones, as we love to call them — is allied 

 with the tender regard for littleness generally. 

 " Sweet little thing," the women say of any tiny 

 work of urt, or bird or plant. And all wom- 

 en being by nature mothers, it is no wonder 

 that their hearts go forth toward whatever seems 

 weak and helpless and shrinking, even as their 

 own babies are. " Dear little flower," says every 

 man instinctively, as he stoops to pick the first 

 daisy of the season. The tininess of the daisy is 

 evidently one source of its attractiveness. 



Dear little English daisy, growing at home on 

 every common and pasture and roadside through- 

 out the length and breadth of the land ! Emphat- 

 ically to us an English flower, toward which, as a 

 symbol of home, we turn with loving regret and 

 longing of heart in distant lands across the sea. 

 In Mr. Charles Eeade's "Never too Late to 

 Mend," there is a touching scene in which a par- 

 ty of rough miners and ex-convicts go together 

 on a Sunday morning through the Australian 

 bush to see and hear an English lark. Many a 

 wayfarer in the heats of a tropical summer or the 

 depths of a Canadian winter has been gladdened 

 and refreshed for a moment by the fragrance of 

 an English violet, crushed and mangled in a let- 

 ter, but still redolent of England and of home. 

 And so, too, our little English daisy is to all of 

 us a rallying-point for many memories of home, 

 in whatsoever quarter of the globe our lot for the 

 moment may be cast. 



Dear little familiar daisy, picked when we 

 were children in the fields around us, or on the 

 half-holidays, when we turned out from town for 

 a blow in the country and a feast of green grass 

 and bright blossoms ! We wove it then into daisy- 

 chains, or pulled it to pieces as we sat, and learned 

 its well-known features by heart a thousand times 

 over. And when we pick it again on a spring 

 morning now, it comes back to us as a love of our 

 childhood, and we feel a thrill of personal affec- 

 tion even to-day toward that insensible little mass 

 of yellow bloom. 



In all these emotional ways does the daisy ap- 

 peal to our affections. Besides its beauty of color 

 and symmetry of form, besides its intellectual in- 

 terest as a composite and its sentimental claims 

 as a flower, it has a title to our love in its charac- 

 ter of a simple little familiar English daisy. This 

 is the secret of its frequent appearance in poe- 

 trv and its effectiveness in rhetorical illustration. 



And, finally, the figure which it takes in literature 

 reacts upon the feelings with which we regard it 

 in the actuality. We think at once of a daisy, a 

 rose, or a violet, as poetical, while we only think 

 of a dahlia or a hollyhock as handsome. With 

 the reading class, memories of Wordsworth, and 

 Burns, and Tennyson, cling about every individual 

 daisy. But here again we must beware of that 

 literally prce-posterous theory which would refer 

 the beauty of an aesthetic object to its external 

 associations. The daisy is admitted as a com- 

 ponent of poetry because it is a flower, pink and 

 white and yellow, pretty, symmetrical, graceful, 

 familiar, and domestic. Poetry is all made up of 

 such pretty objects, strung into a beautiful frame- 

 work of metre, and connected by a thread of nar- 

 rative or abstract lyrical thought. And then, in 

 consequence, we love the objects themselves all 

 the better, because of the good company in which 

 we have so often found them. But they must al- 

 ways have been either pretty or lovable in them- 

 selves to begin with, or else they would never 

 have found their way into poetry at all. 



And now that we have reached this rough 

 analysis of the aesthetic pleasure involved in the 

 contemplation of a daisy, let us hark back again 

 to inquire by what steps it has arisen. The first 

 basis of our enjoyment we saw to be the sensu- 

 ous gratification of pure color. Though red and 

 orange are the most agreeable of all hues to the 

 unsophisticated eye, yet white and yellow are by 

 no means without their proper effectiveness. This 

 pleasure we believed to be the fundamental one 

 in our appreciation of a daisy, as of all other 

 flowers. It is this which first fixes our attention 

 upon it, and which gives it an immediate claim to 

 be included in the aesthetic class. Of all the grati- 

 fication involved in its perception that of color is 

 by far the most universal, and in several cases it 

 is probably the only one. 



Next, in order of development, comes the 

 pleasure of symmetry. It is not perceived by 

 very young children, because it is not immediate 

 and sensuous, like that of color, but requires an 

 intellectual exercise of the higher organs, whose 

 functions are not developed in early life. But 

 with this exception it is almost universal in the 

 human race, though it does not seem to be shared 

 by our anthropoid kinsmen. 



Above this, again, come the emotional pleas- 

 ures of familiarity and homeliness. These re- 

 quire a considerable evolution of the domestic 

 and social feelings before they can attain to any 

 great intensity. They are probably quite wanting 

 in absolute savages, and very little developed 



