504 CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
ful plates, we should have been glad to see twenty ; and instead of so 
splendidly dressed a book, one that might have been more generally 
diffused: but publishers are a wilful race, and must have their way. 
And if this glittering work, which seems intended to lie on drawing- 
room tables in king’s houses, contributes to preserve the worship of 
nature amidst so much that is in such regions opposed to it, the ser- 
vice will be not insignificant. 
Each of the twelve plates in Miss Twamley’s book contains exqui- 
sitely finished representations of two or three of our ordinary wild 
flowers ; and the text, thrown into the form of conversations between 
a very excellent “ Aunt Lucy” and her niece “ Agnes,” and a certain 
“Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn,” and their daughter “ Constance,” contains 
animated descriptions of these and almost every other familiar Eng- 
lish flower, interspersed with very interesting historical anecdotes, and 
not a little useful scientific information, although the parade of science 
is most carefully avoided. The first plate contains the Blue Ane- 
mone, the Small Celandine, and, chief of all, the Snowdrop, of all 
spring flowers one in the most general favour, and partly for its 
being one of the first heralds of the reviving world after the winter’s 
death. But how attractive its beauty! Its tender stalk, its droop- 
ing head, as if modest from very consciousness of beauty, its snow- 
white outer petals, the delicate pencillings of green that variegate its 
shorter and inner ones, touching their outer rim, and leaving white 
the upper inner border !—a very lavishing of simple charms on the 
first flower of the year, betokening boundless stores of beauty to be 
bestowed without stint on all the successive blossoms of the flowering 
months to come! There are homilies, indeed, in these things. They 
speak of an unseen world, and foreshadow its splendour; and more 
and more they speak to us as our minds receive more cultivation ; as 
if some age of the world would come, in which all their mysterious 
revelation would be read with clearer eye. 
We must quote what Miss Twamley says of the Snowdrop, as it 
contains a very amiable apology for the botanists, whose vitality we 
have questioned. Aunt Lucy, tempted out by little Agnes, ventures 
into the garden to see “ the first Snowdrop :”’— 
“Ts it not a delicate little beauty ?” cried Agnes, gently raising 
the white bell, and showing the green streaked under petals, and the 
golden antlers within. 
“ Yes: I always think the name this chaste, modest little flower 
has received, of ‘The Fair Maid of February,’ a most graceful fancy ; 
I wish I knew to whom we are indebted for it. Our own name of 
Snowdrop is beautifully descriptive ; so is the French, perce-neige, 
and the Italian buca-neve, both meaning snow-piercer. The botani- 
cal name, galanthus, is derived from the Greek, and signifies milk- 
flower.” 
* Ah!” said Agnes, “I like those names; they are sensible, and 
one can remember them, because they mean the thing they belong 
to ; but the strange, difficult, out-of-the-way words so often given as 
