A SHARP LOOKOUT 25 



silver gray at point-blank view, when the eye pene- 

 trates the fur; each separate hair is gray the first 

 half and black the last. This is a sample of nature's 

 half truths. 



Which are our sweet-scented wild flowers? Put 

 your nose to every flower you pluck, and you will 

 be surprised how your list will swell the more you 

 smell. I plucked some wild blue violets one day, 

 the ovata variety of the sagittata^ that had a faint 

 perfume of sweet clover, but I never could find 

 another that had any odor. A pupil disputed with 

 his teacher about the hepatica, claiming in opposi- 

 tion that it was sweet-scented. Some hepaticas are 

 sweet-scented and some are not, and the perfume is 

 stronger some seasons than others. After the un- 

 usually severe winter of 1880-81, the variety of 

 hepatica called the sharp-lobed was markedly sweet 

 in nearly every one of the hundreds of specimens I 

 examined. A handful of them exhaled a most deli- 

 cious perfume. The white ones that season were 

 largely in the ascendant; and probably the white 

 specimens of both varieties, one season with an- 

 other, will oftenest prove sweet-scented. Darwin 

 says a considerably larger proportion of white flow- 

 ers are sweet-scented than of any other color. The 

 only sweet violets I can depend upon are white, 

 Viola hlanda and Viola Canadensis^ and white 

 largely predominates among our other odorous wild 

 flowers. All the fruit-trees have white or pinkish 

 blossoms. I recall no native blue flower of New 

 York or New England that is fragrant except in the 



