"THE SWEET O' THE YEAR" 139 



it was the favorite plant of the lion it was called 

 Herba leonis. 



The columbine was valued for many medicinal 

 virtues. 



"The scarlet and yellow columbine," writes 

 Matthew, "is one of our most beautiful wild flowers. 

 It is my experience that certain flowers have certain 

 favorite haunts, which are exclusively held by them 

 year after year. This flower is in its prime about 

 the first of June, and is nearly always found beside 

 some lichen-covered rock." 



The English and American flowers differ, al- 

 though the early colonists brought the English 

 flower with them. Grant Allen tells us : 



"The English columbine is a more developed type 

 than the American scarlet, is never yellow in the 

 wild state, but often purple, and, sometimes, blue. 

 Larkspur, ranking still higher in the floral scale, in 

 virtue of its singular bilateral blossoms, is usually 

 blue, though it sometimes reverts to reddish-purple, 

 or white ; while monkshood, the very top of the tree 

 on this line of development, is usually deep ultra- 

 marine, only a few species being prettily variegated 

 with pale blue and white. As a rule, blue flowers 

 are the very highest; and the reason seems to lie in 

 the strange fact, first discovered by Sir John Lub- 



