&3 PROSERPINA. 



it the pillar. Instead of 'ovary,' I shall say ' Treasury' (for 

 a seed isn't an egg, but it is a treasure). The style I shall call 

 the 'Shaft,' and the stigma the 'Volute.' So you will have 

 your entire pillar divided into tjie treasury, at its base, the 

 shaft, and the volute ; and I think you will find these divi- 

 sions easily remembered, and not unfitted to the sense of the 

 words in their ordinary use. 



18. Round this central, but, in the poppy, very stumpy, 

 pillar, you find a cluster of dark threads, with dusty pen- 

 dants or cups at their ends. For these the botanists name 

 ' stamens,' may be conveniently retained, each consisting of a 

 ' filament,' or thread, and an ' anther,' or blossoming part. 



And in this rich corolla, and pillar, or pillars, with their 

 treasuries, and surrounding crowd of stamens, the essential 

 flower consists. Fewer than these several parts, it cannot 

 have, to be a flower at all ; of these, the corolla leads, and is 

 the object of final purpose. The stamens and the treasuries 

 are only there in order to produce future corollas, though 

 often themselves decorative in the highest degree. 



These, I repeat, are all the essential parts of a flower. But 

 it would have been difficult, with any other than the poppy, 

 to have shown you them alone ; for nearly all other flowers 

 keep with them, all their lives, their nurse or tutor leaves, 

 the group which, in stronger and humbler temper, pro- 

 tected them in their first weakness, and formed them to the 

 first laws of their being. But the poppy casts these tutorial 

 leaves away. It is the finished picture of impatient and 

 luxury-loving youth, at first too severely restrained, then 

 casting all restraint away, yet retaining to the end of life 

 unseemly and illiberal signs of its once compelled submission 

 to laws which were only pain, not instruction. 



19. Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the 

 scarlet line at its side ; break it open and unpack the poppy. 

 The whole flower is there complete in size and colour, its 

 stamens full-grown, but all packed so closely that the fine silk 

 of the petals is crushed into a million of shapeless wrinkles. 

 When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from torture : 

 the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground ; 



