II. PINGUK*ULA. 47 



are often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal 

 number is five. Tearing away the calyx, I find the 

 flower to have been held by it as a lion might hold his 

 prey by the loins if he missed its throat ; the blue petals 

 being really campannlate, and the flower best described 

 as a dark bluebell, seized and crushed almost flat by its 

 own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now also the upper 

 petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and 

 well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the 

 lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the 

 point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this 

 centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an 

 irregular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly 

 like the wild flung Medusa like embroidery of the white 

 Lucia.* 



4. The calyx is of a dark soppy green, I said; like 

 that of sugary preserved citron ; the root leaves are of 

 green just as soppy, but pale and yellowish, as if they 

 were half decayed ; the edges curled up and, as it were, 

 water-shri veiled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long 

 in water. And the whole plant looks as if it had been a 

 violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live 

 there not for its own sins, but for some Emperor 

 Pansy's, far away in the garden, in a partly boggish, 



* Our ' Lucia Nivea,' ' Blanche Lucy; ' in present botany, Bog 

 bean! having no connection whatever with any manner of bean, but 

 only a slight resemblance to bean-fcar^ in its own lower ones. Com- 

 pare Ch. IV. 11. 



