HA RD WICKE'S SCIENCE- G OSSIP. 



hours. So it comes about beyond a doubt that a 

 certain set escaped from the shining crowd, have 

 rooted and sprung to light upon this stone wall close 

 at hand. Draw, now, a sketch of one and mark it 

 with a T. Its flower-stalks, you remark compassion- 

 ately, are weak and slender, and notice how certain 

 of them, as it were in compensation, are hammered 

 out so as to compose a lathe-like band. An exa- 

 mination of a series of these dilated stalks, procured 

 from the low, damp orchards, beneath whose shadow 

 they are fabricated year after year, will infallibly 

 convince you that the thinner ones have here united 

 together in the fashion of a double-barrelled gun, 

 forming thus a tube with separating partitions that 

 have afterwards split down lengthwise, and become 

 absorbed by its growth and expansion, so that the 

 root, stimulated by some undetermined cause, has 

 really put forth stems of greater bore with larger and 

 more fiery heads ; or sometimes, as you will gather 

 from our sketch, the thick stalks remain as clustered 

 columns crowned with two, three, or more blossom? 

 that have failed to amalgamate. Let us proceed a 

 few steps further and we shall see trailing over this 

 same wall, a gypsy rose, or Knautia, with two 

 heads of three flowers, supported by braid-like bands 

 formed of their three diverging stalks. Is it not 

 wonderful ? 



The daze of the sun on the revery-haunted crag, 

 giddy flight of the Tau moth, and the luxuriance of 

 the goat's-beard, whose flowers seem to fall in yellow 

 fountains, have seared the soul with the impression 

 of an impulsive and tyrannical nature, and with 

 a painful sense of fading beauty, which is conducive 

 to adoration, we seem to hear a hidden harmony, 

 and to perceive that everything is changing ; let us 

 wander, fancy-led, over the vernal bloom. See here, 

 as we rove, is a pink Knautia with the three-fold 

 head and three-fold stem, and quite a number of blue 

 and pink ones that possess a central misshapen head 

 and two lateral bells, which, despite that this plant is 

 a tetandria, show five equal rays, with two calyx leaves, 

 raised on longer or shorter stalks, or on no stalks at 

 all ; and, yet more strange, the central stalk of one 

 has taken two zigzags sending out such a floweret at 

 each angle. Among the rotten needles of the fir- 

 wood the bird's-nest orchis personates the broom- 

 rape, and everything has an environment ; can it be 

 now that the gipsy rose, that grows so sadly purple 

 in the shade, is about to appear as a vervaine-like 

 spike on the crag of Toulant ? Time was when new 

 flowers were looked for as an expression of an all- 

 pervading mind ; in our short-sightedness we con- 

 ceive that there is nothing new beneath the sun. 



A bee-hawk moth, on account of its olive tint 

 easily mistaken for a moss-carder bee, suddenly 

 poises over a Knautia, slyly depresses its body, and 

 glues on to the under surface of a leaf, an oval, pale- 

 green egg, which, in the course of events, will assert 

 its cadetship as a horned caterpillar ; so that the 



probabilities are that it had ancestors whose wings 

 were mailed with scales, it being only bee-like in its 

 habit of buzzing at meadow-flowers on the skirts of 

 the woodland. Preoccupied with the dandelions of 

 the future, and the hawk-moths entombed in litho- 

 graphic slabs, we have quite unawares taken our seat 

 upon a bank where grow the rathe flowers which 

 recall our sorrows and consecrate the memory of a 

 scientist. Have we been walking in a nightmare, or 

 has the genius of evolution and ordered progress, 

 waved around us its wand of enchantment, and 

 called forth all that is pleasing and new. At first 

 sight it would appear as though the primroses that 

 we thought to gather are pining away and changing 

 into oxlips, for either they are stunted, showing a 

 blossom or two that rises a couple of inches from the 

 ground, or where the parched soil is caked and hard, 

 and broken escargot shells abound, and glow-worms 

 kindle amorous of the lurid night ; their flowers 

 endeavouring ito 'Spring forth in their wonted pro- 

 fusion, show taper stems and narrow petals, that 

 cause them to resemble yellow gentians, a class of 

 plants that have so often intimated to us in our 

 rambles over the mountains and hills that we are 

 approaching the precincts of a dry limestone waste. 

 Surely we have here discovered that struggle for 

 existence, concerning which we have heard so much, 

 and in regard to which we have felt so much ; let us, 

 with trembling hand, sketch one of these starved and 

 hungry primroses, the child of misfortune, and mark 

 it with a C. Indeed, it now appears that the greater 

 proportion of these plants, among which we are 

 reclining at our ease, are not of an honest stamp such 

 as pert primrose dames would admire ; beneath the 

 shadow of the wall they apologetically assume a 

 primrose shape, but even there their stalks are weak 

 and thread-like, and some of them are tied together, 

 and, as for the rest, exposed to the flecking shade 

 and freckling sun, they are mostly changed into rods 

 with two, three, or more prongs ; mimic pitch-forks, 

 each capped with its bud or blossom, so that some- 

 times we see them branching out quite close to the 

 ground, or the terminal nosegay is raised as in 

 triumph high into the air, when wilful fancy pictures 

 that at some period in primrose story, it became so 

 poised to escape from the snow that lies long on the 

 grassy flanks of the mountains. As seen beneath the 

 lens which reveals the scheme of creation, the oxlips 

 mostly have their stamens inserted about a fourth of 

 an inch below the corolla into a little cup, as have 

 some of the nondescript primroses ; but since there is 

 another form where the] vase-like dilation com- 

 mences at least three quarters of an inch lower down, 

 it will be worth while to outline these difterently- 

 shaped nectar-pots set out for the bumble and 

 butterfly, and we will mark the plants A and B. 

 You may likewise notice a graduated change from 

 the salver-shaped primrose blossoms to the oxlip 

 bells, which either fall straggling like those we will 



