194 LINARIA CYMBALARIA. 



and everywhere. Popular opinion endorses this statement, for it 

 has given this plant the names of " Roving Sailor" and " Mother 

 of Thousands." Nature, with her myriad forms of created things, 

 woos us to her teaching. She daily unfolds her vast lesson-book 

 to all who will observe. Nothing has been made in vain. It 

 cannot, therefore, be a trivial occupation, for a little while at 

 least, to study one of our simple wild flowers. 



Artists have delighted in our wild flowers, and so, accord- 

 ing to Ruskin, Bellini, the great Italian painter, who, with his 

 brother, is believed to have been the founder of the Venetian 

 school of painting, filled the creviced walls of his pictures with 

 large bunches of the Linaria cymbaiaria, known in Italy by the 

 name of Erbadella Madontia. My task, however, just now, lies 

 not in the realms of poetry or painting, but it is my duty to lay 

 before you a monograph of tliis little plant. I have the misfor- 

 tune to write upon a subject about which nothing of any import- 

 ance has already been written, and I have searched in vain all the 

 catalogues of microscopical slides for illustrations. In my 

 researches, however, I continually met with this pretty Linaria 

 " creeping over the grey wall of the ruin," as Anne Pratt writes, 

 " and hanging down its threadlike branches from the ancient 

 church-tower, where it fixes its roots in the smallest crevices, its 

 rich, thick, green leaves and numerous blossoms forming a hand- 

 some tapestry with which to hide the decay of the building." Its 

 simple beauty charmed me. 



The Linaria cyjiibalaria, or "Ivy-Leaf Toad-Flax" (PI. XXL, 

 Fig.i),belongs, in the natural system, to the large class of exogenous 

 plants, sub-class Corolliflorce, its flowers containing both calyx and 

 corolla, the latter being monopetalous and personate. It further 

 belongs to the order Scrophularacece, its petals and calyx having 

 five irregular divisions. Its carpels are united into a superior two- 

 celled, many-seeded pistil. 



In the artificial system, its old generic name of Linaria was 

 abandoned, and, in Withering's " Botany," it is to be found 

 under the class Didynamia (two long and two short stamens), 

 order Angiosperniia (having a closed seed-vessel), genus Antirrhi- 

 num, species Cymbalaria, so that, in this system, it must be looked 

 for in the family of the snapdragons, although, unlike them, its 

 corolla possesses a spur. 



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