COLOURS OP FLOWERS 223 



flame-coloured, and it is often preceded by the word 

 "gorgeous." This contradictory mixture of terms is 

 generally used to mean bright scarlet. When I look 

 at a flame, whether of fire or candle, I see that the 

 colour is a rather pale yellow, with a reddish tiage 

 about its upper forks, and side wings often of a bluish 

 white — no scarlet anywhere. The nearest approach to 

 red is in the coals, not in the flame. In the case of 

 the candle, the point of the wick is faintly red when 

 compared with the flame, but about the flame there is 

 no red whatever. A distant bonfire looks red at night, 

 but I take it that the apparent redness is from seeing 

 the flames through damp atmosphere, just as the har- 

 vest-moon looks red when it rises. 

 ' And the strange thing is that ia all these cases the 

 likeness to the unlike, and much less bright, colour is 

 given with. an air of conferring the highest compliment 

 on the flower in question. It is as if, wishing to praise 

 some flower of a beautiful blue, one called it a brilliant 

 slate-roof blue. This sounds absurd, because it is 

 unfamiliar, but the unsuitability of the comparison is 

 scarcely greater than in the examples just quoted 



It seems most reasonable in describing the colour 

 of flowers to look out for substances whose normal 

 colour shows but little variation— such, for example, as. 

 sulphur. The colour of sulphur is nearly always the 

 same. Citron, lemon, and canary are useful colour- 

 names, indicating different strengths of pure pale 

 yellow, inclinrag towards a tinge of the palest green. 



