TEE ORIGIN OF FLOWERS. 



151 



of the sixteen who secured the rejection of the 

 amendment belong to the Democratic party ; one 

 is regarded as " doubtful ; " of the sixteenth I 

 have no information. The twenty-eight who 

 voted in its favor are, without exception, Repub- 

 licans. 



That the Roman Catholic hierarchy should so 

 far renounce the traditions of their Church as to 

 sanction the attendance of the children of Roman 

 Catholic parents at schools which are not under 

 the control of the priests, is very improbable. 

 That, with all the difficulties created by the rival- 

 ry of the public system, they should abandon the 

 hope of obtaining assistance for their own paro- 

 chial schools from the public funds, is equally 

 improbable. The conflict appears to have come 

 to an end for the present, and to renew it imme- 

 diately would seem useless. But the political 

 troubles of America are not over. The two ex- 

 isting political parties are rapidly dissolving, and 

 within a very few years they will have to be re- 



constituted, probably under new names, and cer- 

 tainly on new principles. The priesthood will 

 watch for their occasion, and will grasp it. In 

 many of the States the Catholic voters are so 

 numerous that politicians will be under a strong 

 temptation to purchase their support. Here and 

 there the denominationalists may win a tempora- 

 ry victory. But on the whole I have a firm be- 

 lief that, with whatever persistency and energy 

 the struggle may be sustained, the general defeat 

 of the piiests is certain. For the American 

 people to surrender their common-school system 

 would be to confess that they are a conquered 

 race. It would be to acknowledge that Roman 

 Catholic immigrants from Europe have been 

 strong enough to trample under foot the proud- 

 est traditions and to destroy the dearest institu- 

 tions of the republic. It would imply a com- 

 plete revolution in the spirit and temper and 

 habits of the nation. 



— Nineteenth Century. 



THE ORIGIN OF FLOWERS. 



By Prof. GRANT ALLEN. 



IN the whole brilliant museum which lavish Na- 

 ture opens so bountifully before the eyes of 

 those who can see — a class unhappily far smaller 

 than it ought to be, but growing from day to day 

 as each neophyte opens in turn the sealed eyes 

 of his neighbors — there is nothing so lovely as 

 the bright and graceful flowers of our meadows, 

 our hedge-rows, and our gardens. There is noth- 

 ing inanimate to which we turn with so tender 

 and so loving a regard ; nothing which we so in- 

 stinctively invest with the attributes and emotions 

 of the human soul. From the merest child and 

 the veriest savage to the truest artist and the deep- 

 est philosopher, every heart has ever ready in its 

 depths a thrill of delight in unison with those 

 exquisite gems of God's handiwork. In a previ- 

 ous paper ■ I have endeavored to trace this feeling 

 to its varied sources in the minds of men, and to 

 disentangle the many strands of simple and com- 

 plex emotion which, when woven together, make 

 up our total synthetic pleasure in the contem- 

 plation of a wayside posy. But in the analysis 

 which I then undertook, it was necessary to ac- 

 cept the love of color in itself as a given factor, 

 whose origin we were content for the time to 

 1 See the Corn/till Magazine for January, 1878. 



leave unexplained. There is reason to think, 

 however, that the pleasure of simple colors, red 

 and orange and yellow, green and violet and pur- 

 ple, which stands out as so distinct an element in 

 our aesthetic nature, may be finally traced back to 

 the remote effects of flowers and fruits upon the 

 animal kingdom generally, and upon primitive 

 man in particular. So far as the human species 

 is concerned, there can be little doubt that our 

 color-sense depends more upon the golden rind 

 of the orange, the crimson cheeks of the cherry, 

 the melting tints of the mango and the peach, 

 the blush of grapes and apples, or the ruddy glow 

 of wayside berries, than upon the thousand beau- 

 ties of English wild-flowers or the massive wealth 

 of tropical blossoms. But if we would track the 

 question to its very roots, we must go down first 

 to the butterfly and the primrose, before we can 

 understand the true relations of the bird or the 

 mammal to the various fruits which attract them. 

 In short, we must push back our inquiry to- 

 day to the ultimate origin of colored bodies and 

 of the color-sense. If we look about us in the un- 

 sophisticated fields and valleys, we shall find that 

 the ordinary hues of Nature are green, brown, 

 and blue. Only a few exceptional objects, like 



