I 10 FLott KKS OF THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



offering and expression of kindly feeling. The French word for 

 the Marigold and for care and anxiety is the same, souci, and the 

 flower is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Mater dolorosa. It would, 

 however, appear to have been originally but an undesigned corrup- 

 tion, or else play upon words, its old name being soucicle, a word 

 derived from the Latin so/is cyclus, the circle of the sun, either 

 on account of the brilliant yellow disk and rays of the flower, 

 not unlike the heraldic representation of the sun, or the habit of 

 the flowers turning with the sun toward the light --two theories 

 for the origin of a name that would equally well suit the Sun- 

 flower of our gardens, a flower that Gerarde, writing in 1596, calls 

 the ' Flower of the Sunne, or Marigold of Peru.' The English 

 name, when analyzed, means literally the ' golden flower of Mary,' 

 and points to a time when the monks held sway both in religious 

 thought and botanical nomenclature, and not unfrequently tried 

 to combine the two." 



The garden Marigold is reckoned a good barometer, having the 

 habit of closing up its petals at the approach of rain. Whether 

 our present plant does this I cannot say. But many flowers cer- 

 tainly do, or at least they shut up upon the obscuration of the sun. 

 Whether they think the clouding in of that luminary is premon- 

 itory of rain I know not. But I have seen a field brilliant with the 

 blossoms of the Dandelion, almost literally a "cloth of gold" 

 shining in the morning sun, and in an hour not a single trace of a 

 flower could be seen anywhere. The sun had gone into retirement 

 behind thick clouds, and the Dandelions had every one folded up 

 their yellow rays and wrapped their green mantle around them, and 

 gone to sleep, indistinguishable in the universal green of the 

 meadows. 



