24 ORCHIDS. 
Such true poetry in prose as the subjoined extract, — though 
not specially related to the Masdevallia,—may justly have place 
anywhere in the literature of plants and flowers : — 
“These last words, linking leaves, limbs, and blossoms, touch 
the deepest flower-secret that has thus far been discovered. School- 
boys know it now; but the wisest men were just knowing enough 
a century ago to guess it. It is the secret that botanists call ‘ met- 
amorphosis:’ the secret that each and every organ of the flower is 
but a transformed leaf; that bud-scale and bract, sepal and petal, 
stamen and pistil, back to the new bud-scale, in spite of all the 
difference of their forms, and all their varied tints,—are but suc- 
cessive leaf transfigurations. Economic Nature gets her new 
effects, not by selecting new themes, but by playing variations on 
the old themes. When she would make a blossom on an apple- 
tree, or on a pasture weed, she only shortens and alters what would 
else have been a common leafy branch. 
“But not content with such transfiguration, the mother of all 
beauty takes up the separate organs, and tenderly carries out her 
variations on each one. She bears fixed laws in mind, and never 
really forgets her arithmetic,—the rules of twos and threes and 
fours and fives; but by multiplying parts, by dividing parts, by 
joining them at this place on their edges, then on that; by enlarg- 
ing some, and making others smaller; by their complete abortion 
sometimes; by moulding horns and cups; by unfurling wings, by 
hanging bells, by ravelling fringes out,— by all sorts of dainty 
devices of sculpture, she makes the myriad distinct species of 
miracles that men stare at untiringly, as the flowers of spring. 
It is rare luck to turn up from the soil of some classic land frag- 
ments of a marble statue of old beauty. But Nature flings her 
