54 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS. 



making the tint called orange, are very rare perhaps the 

 two species of wild balsam are the best examples ; while 

 flowers wherein the red inclines towards blue, making 

 the tint called purple, are very common. 



The little pimpernel, like the sow-thistle and many other 

 plants, is a weed of cultivation ; though it may at times 

 be seen expanding its delicate blossoms by the hard and 

 dusty highway, or on some waste plot of ground, it is more 

 commonly found in corn-fields and in gardens. It is almost 

 cosmopolitan, and is as well known at the Antipodes as 

 in any of our English shires. There are two species of 

 pimpernel the present plant, or Anagallis arvensis, and 

 the bog pimpernel, or Anagallis tenella of the botanist. 

 The generic name is a somewhat fanciful one ; it is derived 

 from two Greek words signifying " again" and "to adorn/' 

 because year after year these little blossoms spring up to 

 beautify the waste places by their grace and delicacy of 

 form and colour. The name appears somewhat far-fetched 

 and slightly inappropriate, not because the little plant does 

 not thus year by year adorn the fields, but because, while 

 doing so, it is, after all, only doing what many other equally 

 welcome flowers are doing no less and getting no especial 

 credit for. Perhaps its universality may be pleaded in its 

 favour, and its attachment to man, whose footsteps it has 

 followed, as we have seen, the wide world over, may have 

 earned for it some little return. We find it mentioned in 

 the lists of plants of places so scattered as Persia, Nepaul, 

 China, New Holland, Mauritius, Cape of Good Hope, Japan, 

 Egypt, Abyssinia, United States, Mexico, and Chili. It is 

 to be found in all the temperate regions in both hemi- 

 spheres, but shuns the Arctic cold and hardly bears more 

 than sub-tropical heat. In England it is often called the 



