CHAPTER X 
FLOWERS 
THE interest in botany of many of us undoubtedly 
springs from a love of flowers. 
There is nothing modern about this appreciation, 
for we find that men and women in the very oldest 
civilisations, from which we have any satisfactory 
evidence, not only delighted in flowers, but had the 
oddest and strangest symbolisms drawn directly from 
buds and blossoms. 
One has but to remember the story of “lovely 
Thais,” the friend of Alexander the Great, of Mzenander 
the poet, and who became the spouse of Ptolemy, King 
of Egypt. 
When the mummy of this famous beauty was dis- 
covered, it held in its withered hand a plant of the 
rose-of-Jericho, of course a symbol of the resurrection.’ 
When this well-known desert plant is placed in water 
it uncurls and revives, becoming fresh, green, and 
vigorous, 
Lovely Thais hoped that she also would enjoy 
immortality. 
One French author at once and _ unhesitatingly 
declared that she must have been a Christian. One 
would scarcely have supposed so from what little has 
been recorded of her life, but as a fact she died many 
years before Christ was born. 
But in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon poets compared 
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