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but I believe this is not borne out by actual observation. And in 

 your woods, growing with the wild anemones, you wiU find a 

 curious though not a brilliant flower, which will be certain to take 

 your attention. This is the Herb Paris, a small plant with four 

 leaves of one size, exactly arranged in a regular whorl, and four 

 sepals and four petals in the same regular order. You may at 

 first wonder why so fine a name as Paris has been given to it, but 

 as you note the regular arrangement of all its parts, you will 

 acknowledge that the etymology is right which says it is herha 

 paris — the herb of equal parts. The old English name is Herb 

 Truelove, from the an-angement of its leaves in the conventional 

 form of a lover's knot. It is the English representative of a family 

 chiefly confined to North America, of which all the species have 

 the same regular arrangement of the parts, but they are in threes, 

 and not, as our plant, in fours, so that the plants are called 

 Trillium, of the family Trilliacese. 



Let us leave the woods for the open heath, where we find the 

 Heath, Ling, Furze, Whin, and Gorse. They are favourite plants 

 with all, as giving perhaps more distinct colour to our more barren 

 hill sides than any plants in the British Flora, and giving them a 

 colour too which no other part of the world can equal, if we only 

 believe the excellent testimony of Mr. Wallace, the traveller in the 

 Malayan Archipelago, who tells us that "during twelve years 

 spent amid the gi-andest tropical vegetation, I have seen nothing 

 comparable to the effect produced on our (English) landscapes by 

 gorse, broom, heather, wild hyacinths, hawthorn, purple orchises, 

 and buttercups." Linnseus was of the same opinion, for it ia 

 recorded of him that when in England he saw for the first time a 

 gorse bush in full flower, he fell on his knees and gave thanks for 

 being spared to see the most beautiful object in creation. The 

 heath is not only extremely beautiful, but it is very interesting 

 from the position it occupies in the geography of plants. The 

 heath tribe occupies a very long but very narrow line, ranging 

 from Iceland, through the British Islands, along the western coast 

 of Europe and Africa, till it reaches the Cape of Good Hope, where 

 it is most abundant. It is entirely absent from the New World, 

 except in one small spot of Labrador, where it was found for the 



