A Word for Books 



flowering-dog^vood, and discovers too the 

 reasons why, will not his interest in it be 

 increased ? And will it seem less charming 

 to him as it grows more interesting? Let 

 him learn why an orchid is an orchid — why 

 the tiny ladies' -tresses in the field deserve 

 the name as much as the gorgeous cattleya 

 or oncidium of the greenhouse, and he has 

 learned something which surely cannot de- 

 crease his enjoyment of the beauty of either. 



But to do this, you say, beautiful flowers 

 must be pulled to pieces, and this will 

 '^deaden the sense of beauty." By no 

 means. The truth is quite the other way. 

 No one who has not once pulled a flower of 

 a given kind to pieces can fully realize how 

 beautiful it is. All its beauty is not in its 

 larger features or on the outside of its cup. 

 In the interior, in the hidden recesses where 

 the great work of reproduction goes on in a 

 m.yriad difterent ways each more marvellous 

 than the other, resides a great part of the 

 beauty of all flowers, and the major part of 

 the beauty of not a fevr. Even if it led to 

 nothing but a knowledge of the delight which 

 Narure takes in making the tiniest features 



