GENTIANA. 
leaves, but only about a foot high, and ending in a head of flowers 
(with one or two axillary in the last of the leaves, but not nearly so 
well furnished as in G. punctata), which, instead of being gay and 
numerous, smallish, starry, and brilliant yellow, are few and very 
large—deeply baggy six-lobed bells, of the dingiest and _ sickliest 
greenish pallor that it would be possible for even the grossest flatterer 
to call yellow ; and, even so, they are speckled with darkness inside 
till you feel you are looking into the throat of a sick frog for whom 
you have been called in to prescribe against the jaundice. No 
difficulty attends the culture of this treasure in cool peaty soil, and 
in full sun. 
G. Purdomii (F., 303) is near G. Przewalsky, but much better, 
with white-speckled flowers of intense sapphire blue. 
G. purpurea follows in the footsteps of the last ; it is of the same 
height, rather fatter and coarser in the stem: but has more numerous 
limper narrower foliage, highly grooved with nerves, and of a glossy 
dark-green ; the flowers are of the same size and shape, with six 
rounded lobes, and a long calyx gashed to a third of its total length 
(instead of the short calyx of the last, which is hardly cut into lobes at 
all, having only its six irregular teeth). As for the blossoms, they earn 
their name for purpleness by being of a rich vandyke-brown, with 
pallors and mottlings unnameable. An evil weird thing is G. purpurea, 
but handsome to find upon the hills (which it occupies at intervals 
through the Alps away to Kamchatka, often found in single clumps 
or specimens or colonies), but not deserving the fusses that some- 
times seem necessary to win its approval in the garden—where, like 
the rest of the group, it should flower late in the summer. 
G. pyrenaica makes a break in the family tradition. This, though 
small and precious in the highest degree, has neither the high-alpine 
habit nor the high-alpine temper ; but, even without the special bed, 
will sometimes thrive and make wide mats in rich deep sandy peat 
kept reasonably moist in summer and open to the sun. ‘This lovely 
and rare species has many points of interest ; in the first place it does 
not, as I say, climb high into the hills, but forms sound masses in heathy 
and turfy places, damp or dry, on lime or granite, between 4000 and 
5500 feet. And, in the second, it has a most curious distribution ; 
it wins its name in the Pyrenees, where it abounds in the Eastern side 
of the range, alike on the French and on the Spanish frontier ; but it 
then ceases abruptly and is no more heard of throughout all the main 
chains of the Alps, until we come to the Carpathians, where it suddenly 
breaks out again, and then again completely ceases till it has girdled 
the earth and once more leaps to view in Western Asia. It makes 
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