18 
motto by the members of a Natural History Society. Yet it 
is doubtless known to you all, and may serve as a “ shocking 
example” of the state into which some people fall, who neglect 
to use their senses. Much more than simple “ yellow prim- 
roses” are these blossoms to us. I might enlarge upon them 
as the flowers of childhood, round which cluster many ‘‘ sunny 
memories” of our early days, that might otherwise have been 
forgotten; as members of the happy careless hours when 
earth was ever unfolding new treasures and filling our minds 
with delight at its luxuriousness of beauty—the 
“Time when, meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight, 
To us did seem, 
Apparelled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream. 
And again I might dwell upon them as above all others the 
flowers of spring, bright aud happy messengers, coming with 
clear blue skies in January and February to tell us of the 
wealth of form and colour that will shortly dazzle our eyes 
as the bleak days get fewer, and at last disappear. But this 
would be too sentimental ; we must look deeper into Nature 
than this, and derive a still greater intellectual feast from a 
«knowledge of the mysteries of life that lie hidden in the 
Primrose. We discover at once, from the venation of the 
leaves, that the Primrose belongs to the exogenous order of 
plants, these veins forming a network all over the leaf, and 
not running parallel from one end to the other, like those in 
a lily leaf. We notice, moreover, that there is no peduncle or 
stem here: you may express surprise at this, seeing so many 
blossoms springing up from the root, each one at the head of 
a stalk. But these stalks are pedicels or secondary flower 
stalks, like those which spring from the head of a Cowslip 
stalk, and if you cut through a root just below where it emerges 
from the ground, you will notice that all these pedicels spring 
from one circling line marking the real stem, which in this 
case, is to a certain extent suppressed, or rather arresfed in its 
growth. Occasionally, owing to certain circumstances, this 
peduncle shoots up to some height, carrying the pedicels with 
it; then we get the variety commonly called the Oxlip, though 
not the true species of thatname. To this I shall refer again 
presently. 
