1865] Study of Flowers 



In the over-long winter, snow lies heavy on the Flowers 

 Wyoming hills. With me as a boy the yearning for f 

 spring used to rise to a passion long before the spring 

 swelling of the buds. The early flowers were a 

 congtant joy, the succulent spring beauty, dainty 

 rue-anemone, "half-venturing liverworts in furry 

 coats/' bloodroot, wake-robins of three species 

 red, white, and striped the blue, white, and yellow 

 violets. Later came the blue phlox, pink and 

 fragrant azaleas, lobelias blue and scarlet, man- 

 drakes with their fruits "sweetish and nauseous, 

 eaten by pigs and boys," the tall meadow lilies, the 

 little laurels of the swamps and the big ones of the 

 cliffs, and (perhaps most charming of all) fantastic 

 orchids in summer, and the blue fringed gentian in 

 the fall. Trailing arbutus, the first flower to greet 

 our fathers at Plymouth Rock, I never knew until 

 I went to Ithaca, for it is found only under the pines 

 on dry uplands and in maple districts like ours pines 

 grow only in swamps. 



Flowers I loved as flowers that is, as things of interest 

 beauty but I liked them the better because of in 

 the appeal they made to my scientific curiosity 

 regarding their habits and locations, and (especially trees 

 in later years) their origins and relationships. Ac- 

 cordingly I enjoyed the little ones as well as the 

 big, and half a dozen little ones of different species, 

 even though not beautiful, meant more to me than 

 a hundred big ones all of a kind. A special proof of 

 scientific as distinguished from aesthetic interest is 

 to care for the hidden and insignificant. 



A love for trees went with my passion for flowers, 

 and the fact that our country exhibited several 

 wholly different types of forest never failed to hold 



C 25 3 



