182 PROSERPINA. 



habit of dressing in livid and unpleasant colors ; and are 

 distinguished from all other flowers by twisting, not only 

 their stalks, but one of their petals, not once and a half 

 only, but two or three times round, and putting it far 

 out at the same time, as a foul jester would put out his 

 tongue : while also the singular power of grotesque mim- 

 icry, which, though strong also in the other groups of 

 their race, seems in the others more or less playful, is, in 

 these, definitely degraded, and, in aspect, malicious. 



10. Now I find the Latin name ' Satyrium ' attached 

 already to one sort of these flowers ; and we cannot pos- 

 sibly have a better one for all of them. It is true that, 

 in its first Greek form, Dioscorides attaches it to a white, 

 not a livid, flower ; and I dare say there are some white 

 ones of the breed : but, in its full sense, the term is ex- 

 actly right for the entire group of ugly blossoms of whi^ 

 the characteristic is the spiral curve and protraction of 

 their central petal : and every other form of Satyric ugli- 

 ness which I find among the Ophryds, whatever its color, 

 will be grouped with them. And I make them central, 

 because this humour runs through the whole order, and is, 

 indeed, their distinguishing sign. 



11. Then the third group, living actually in the air, and 

 only holding fast by, without nourishing itself from, the 

 ground, rock, or tree-trunk on which it is rooted, may of 

 course most naturally and accurately be called ' Aeria, ' 

 as it has long been popularly known in English by the 

 name of Air-plant. 



