VIOLA 1 : 167 



and opening of its flower, not at all, in any strain of modesty, 

 hiding itself, though it may easily be, by grass or mossy stone, 

 ' half hidden,' but, to the full, showing itself, and intending 

 to be -lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost of its 

 soft power. 



Nor merely in its oblique setting on the stalk, but in the 

 reversion of its two upper petals, the flower shows this pur- 

 pose of being fully seen. (For a flower that does hide itself, 

 take a lily of the valley, or the bell of a grape hyacinth, or a 

 cyclamen.) But respecting this matter of petal-reversion, we 

 must now farther state two or three general principles. 



6. A perfect or pure flower, as a rose, oxalis, or campanula, 

 is always composed of an unbroken whorl, or corolla, in the 

 form of a disk, cup, bell, or, if it draw together again at the 

 lips, a narrow-necked vase. This cup, bell, or vase, is divided 

 into similar petals, (or segments, which are petals carefully 

 joined,) varying in number from three to eight, and enclosed 

 by a calyx whose sepals are symmetrical also. 



An imperfect, or, as I am inclined rather to call it, an ' in- 

 jured ' flower, is one in which some of the petals have infe- 

 rior office and position, and are either degraded, for the bene- 

 fit of others, or expanded and honoured at the cost of others. 



Of this process, the first and simplest condition is the re- 

 versal of the upper petals and elongation of the lower ones, 

 in blossoms set on the side of a clustered stalk. When the 

 change is simply and directly dependent on their position in 

 the cluster, as in Aurora Kegina,* modifying every bell just 

 in proportion as it declines from the perfected central one, 

 some of the loveliest groups of form are produced which can 

 be seen in any inferior organism : but when the irregularity 

 becomes fixed, and the flower is always to the same extent 

 distorted, whatever its position in the cluster, the plant is to 

 be rightly thought of as reduced to a lower rank in creation. 



7. It is to be observed, also, that these inferior forms of 

 flower have always the appearance of being produced by some 

 kind of mischief blight, bite, or ill-breeding ; they never 

 suggest the idea of improving themselves, now, into anything 



* Vol. i., p. 1.62, note. 



