flower." Tlie beauty of the symbol melted the heart of his lord, 

 and the slave obtained his liberty. 



The Hindu racs are passionately fond of flowers, and their 

 ancient Sanscrit books and poems are full of allusions to their 

 beauty and symbolic characfter. With them, the flower of the field 

 is venerated as a symbol of fecundity. In their mytholof^y, at the 

 beginninpf of all things there appeared in the waters the expanded 

 Lotus -blossom, the emblematic flower of life and light ; the Sun, 

 Moon, and Stars are flowers in the celestial garden ; the Sun's 

 ray is a full-blown Rose, which springs from the waters and feeds 

 the sacrificial fire ; the Lightning is a garland of flowers thrown by 

 Narada. I'lishpa (flower), or Pushpaka (flowery), is the epithet 

 applied to the luminous car of the god Kuvera, which was seized 

 by Ravana, the royal monster of Lanka, and recaptured by the 

 demi-god Rama, the incarnation of Vishnu. The bow of Kama, 

 the Indian Cupid, darts forth flowers in the guise of arrows. The 

 Indian poetic lover gathers from the flowers a great number of 

 chaste and beautiful symbols. The following description of a 

 young maiden struck down by illness is a fair example, of this : — 

 " All of a sudden the blighting glance of unpropitious fortune 

 having fallen on that Rose-cheeked Cypress, she laid her head on 

 the pillow of sickness ; and in the flower-garden of her beauty, 

 in place of the Damask Rose, sprang up the branch of the Saffron. 

 Her fresh Jasmine, from the violence of the burning illness, lost its 

 moisture, and her Hyacinth, full of curls, lost all its endurance 

 from the fever that consumed her." 



It was with the classic Greeks, however, that floral symbolism 

 reached its zenith : not only did the Hellenic race entertain an ex- 

 traordinar}' passion for flowers, but with consummate skill they 

 devised a code of floral types and emblems adapted to all phases 

 of public and private life. As Loudon writes, when speaking of the 

 emblematic use made by the Greeks of flowers : — " Not only were 

 they then, as now, the ornament of a beauty, and of the altars of the 

 gods, but the youths crowned themselves with them in the fetes, 

 the priests in religious ceremonies, and the guests in convivial 

 meetings. Garlands of flowers were suspended from the gates 

 of the city in the times of rejoicing . , . the philosophers 

 wore crowns of flowers, and the warriors ornamented their fore- 

 heads with them in times of triumph." The Romans, although they 

 adopted most of the floral symbolic lore of their Hellenic prede- 

 cessors, and in the case of emblematic garlands were particularly 

 refined, were still evidently not so passionately fond of floral 

 symbolism as were the Greeks ; and with the decadence of the 

 Empire, the attractive art gradually fell into oblivion. 



The science of plant symbolism may, if we accept the views 

 of Miss Marshall, a writer on the subject,* be classified into five 



• ' Plant Symbolism,' in * Natural History Notes,' Vol. II. 



