262 BICKNELL: VIOLA OBLIQUA HILL AND OTHER VIOLETS 
peduncles perfectly straight to the very summit.” Thus is the 
overtechnical critic at first gaily allowed his fling. But this 
imagined sceptic need have made less allowance for the “ un- 
botanical draughtsman ” than it is implied he should have done. 
Had Doctor Greene’s: keen eye ever scanned the woodland floor 
among the hills along the Hudson, or on Long Island, it must have 
seen in apparition before it this same pictured violet of Hill’s 
side by side with its living counterpart having flowers postured 
in the self same upwardly oblique way and even strictly erect! 
Here then was the living vindication of Viola obliqua Hill and Sir 
John had waited nearly a century and a half to be put in credit. 
The surprising thing is that his figure ever should have come 
under any doubt. It utters authenticity. Its entire composition 
proclaims that it could have been in no part extemporized. Be- 
yond peradventure we see in it the copy of an actual plant worked 
over by a conscientious but not a facile draughtsman. No 
inattentive sketch, no artist’s fiction, would have been cumbered 
with the needless and inartistic detail shown in this cut nor, like it, 
reveal the painstaking effort of a careful but none too practised 
hand. Nor, as to the flowers should it have been forgotten that 
Hill put in print, and he had the living plant, that they were 
“ oblique,”’ and Aiton that they were “ erect.’”’ I do not know 
whether this violet remained in cultivation in England up to 
the time when Aiton wrote or whether he had ever seen it in 
growth. But if his description was drawn up from herbarium 
specimens having the petals partly discolored from drying it 
offers an explanation of his use of the word straminea in giving the 
color of the flowers. By fault of this word, nothing else can 
explain it, the history of the blue-flowered Viola obliqua has come 
confusingly in touch with violets so remotely related to it as the 
white- or creamy-flowered Viola blanda and the yellow-flowered 
Viola rotundifolia, 
As for our plant which so perfectly upholds Hill’s illustration 
I doubt not that ‘t may be found bearing its upwardly looking 
flowers over a far wider range than where I myself have seen it 
growing, for it is none other than the common violet we have been 
taught to call Viola afinis LeConte. The Illustrated Flora 
was therefore right in restoring the name Viola obliqua, although 
