THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 39 



ing by far the substance of his treatise. The title-page gives 

 the clue to the book. 



"Oh Proserpine! 



For the flowers now, which frighted, thou let's fall 



From Dis's waggon." 



Proserpine was the daughter of Zeus and the earth-goddess 

 Demeter. As she was gathering flowers with her playmates in 

 a meadow, the earth opened, and Pluto, god of the dead, ap- 

 peared and carried her off to become his queen in the nether 

 world. The pomegranate was her symbol, and flower festivals 

 were held every spring in her honor. Thus her name was fit- 

 ting to symbolize an anthology. 



Ruskin gives us here an unconventional monograph on the 

 more common (and therefore less studied) flora of field and 

 hedgerow ; as the violet, butterwort, foxglove, thistle, dande- 

 lion. He descants eloquently on the root, stem, leaf, flower, 

 bark and even genealogy of Proserpina, — fascinating the 

 reader with the life-history of these trite flowers. Not that we 

 are to expect a systematic or even satisfactory text-book of 

 Botany, since there is quite enough in the book to challenge 

 opposition. But it is throughout stimulating. For Ruskin is 

 more than botanist, or artist, or even critic. He is above all a 

 moralist ; now drawing some profound life-lessons from the 

 habits of the humblest plants of the meadows ; now leading us 

 delightfully among the classic fields of Thessaly and Arcady, 

 with the companionship of Diomed and Athena, with Daphne 

 and Apollo. 



Our author pays his respects in no uncertain terms to those 

 botanists who offend with their ever-changing nomenclature. 

 On this point the "conservatives" have a strong ally. Speak- 

 ing of the genealogy of flowers, he writes : — "I call the present 

 system of nomenclature confusedly edifying, because it intro- 

 duces, without apparently any consciousness of the inconsist- 

 ency, and certainly with no apology for it, names founded 



