HEEODOTUS AS A BOTANIST. 105 



The Lotus. 



Kingsley's Hypatla, pp. 176 and 177. 



" Yes " — slie went on, after the nietliod of her Kschool, who 

 preferred, hke most decaying ones, harangues to dialectic, and 

 synthesis to induction. " Look at yon lotus flower, rising 

 like Aphrodite from the wave in which it has slept through- 

 out the night, and saluting, with bending swan-neck, that 

 sun which it will follow lovingly around the sky. Is there 

 no more there than brute matter, pipes and fibres, colour and 

 shape, and the meaningless life-in-death which men call 

 vegetation ? Those old P]gyptian priests knew better, who 

 could see in the number and the form of those ivory petals, 

 and golden stamina, in that mysterious daily birth out of the 

 wave, in that nightly baptism, from which it rises each 

 morning, reborn to a new life, the signs of some divine idea, 

 some mysterious law, common to the flower itself, to the 

 white-robed priestess who held it in the temple rites, and to 

 the goddess to whom they both wei-e consecrated . . . 

 The flower of Isis ! . . . Ah I — well. Nature has her 

 sad symbols, as well as her fair ones. And in proportion as 

 a misguided nation has forgotten the worship of her to 

 whom they owed their greatness, for novel and barbaric 

 superstitions, so has her sacred flower grown rarer and more 

 rare till now — fit emblem of the worship over which it used 

 to shed its perfume^ — it is only to be found in gardens such 

 as these, — a curiosity to the vulgar, and, to such as me, a 

 lingering monument of wisdom and of glory passed away." 



Philamnion, it may be seen, was far advanced by this 

 time, for he bore the allusions to Isis without the slightest 

 shudder. Nay — he dared even to offer consolation to the 

 beautiful mourner. 



*' The philosopher,"' he said, " will hardly lament the loss of 

 a mere outward idolatry. For if, as you seem to think, 

 there Avere a root of spiritual truth in the symbolism of 

 nature, that cannot die, and thus the lotus flower must still 

 retain its meaning, as long as its species exists on earth." 



