JANUARY 49 



of the fourteenth, it must have been named the Order 

 of the Suspender !) Well, it may be so, and the day 

 may be at hand when the display of bunting in any 

 form may be discarded as childish. All that I urge is 

 that, so long as we do hoist flags, they shall mean 

 something intelligible. 



Even the grave science of botany has deigned to 

 borrow something from heraldry. There is no more 

 cosmopolitan plant than the common brake fern, which 

 has made itself at home in every temperate quarter of 

 the globe, and threatens to obliterate many less robust 

 herbs. Take a bracken root, cut it obliquely across 

 with a sharp knife, and the brown veins in the white 

 pith will present you with a very fair simulacrum of a 

 double-headed eagle. This, the emblem of the Holy 

 Roman Empire, was claimed by its heralds as token 

 of its rightful supremacy wherever bracken might be 

 found. Hence Linnaeus named this fern Pteris aquilina, 

 the eagle fern, and the title has been confirmed by 

 modern classifiers. 



Strange as it may seem, increasing knowledge of 

 zoology has been one cause of the decay of heraldic 

 art. Naturalistic portraiture of animals is a snare to 

 which herald painters and sculptors first showed a 

 tendency towards the end of the seventeenth century. 

 So long as neither the artist nor the general public had 

 ever set eyes on a lion, they were quite satisfied with 

 the attenuated creature of terrific aspect which repre- 

 sented that animal in early heraldry, but so soon as 

 conventional drawing became tainted Avith an attempt 

 at realism, the rampant lion became an absurdity, no 

 D 



