CLXXV— PANSIES. 
Viola tricolor Linne and V. arvensis Murray. 
T HE British representatives of the genus Viola , some fourteen species, fall into 
two sharply contrasted Sections or sub-genera known technically as Nominium 
and Melanium , though we may well render these names as Violets and Pansies. 
The Violets, as we have seen, have cleistogamous flowers, produced in late 
summer or autumn, as well as the earlier and more conspicuous blossoms. Their 
stipules are comparatively small, membranous, and simple : their upper petals are 
directed forward ; and their stigmas are external. Of this group the species we have 
here represented is the favourite Sweet Violet (V. odorala Linn6). It is a perennial 
with a thick scaly rhizome sending out long rooting branches or stolons. Its leaves 
are broadly cordate, with their stipules fringed with glandular hairs, and a few 
depressed hairs on their stalks and on the peduncles. There are a pair of small 
bracts rather above the middle of the flower-stalk : the spur is nearly straight and 
generally of a deep violet colour, while the tails of the anthers within it are bluntly 
lanceolate and curve downward ; and the capsule is bluntly triangular, downy, and 
often tinged with purple. Mrs. Gregory describes five well-marked varieties, and 
five distinct hybrids with Viola hirta Linn6. The White Violet {V. odorata , var. 
dumetorum Rouy and Foucaud) is even more frequent in a wild state than the typical 
purple form. 
The Sweet Violet has been a favourite with our poets from Chaucer downward. 
Abundant around Stratford-on-Avon, it seems to have been especially dear to Shake- 
speare ; but we can only quote here a pretty simile from St. Francis of Sales : — 
“A true widow is,” he says, “like a little March Violet, shedding an exquisite perfume in the fragrance of hrr devotion ; 
and, always hidden under the ample leaves of her lowliness, and by her quiet dress showing the spirit of her mortification, she 
seeks untrodden and solitary places.” 
The Pansies, on the other hand, have no cleistogene flowers : their stipules are 
large, leafy, and pinnately lobed : their upper petals stand erect ; and their stigma 
lines a little hole in the knob-like extremity of the style, and has a tuft of hairs on 
each side of it. The forms included in this Section are unquestionably variable. 
They include annual, lowland, small-flowered, self-fertile forms, such as Viola arvensis 
Murray, represented on the right of our Plate ; others, larger-flowered, with purple 
petals with yellow eyes and black honey-guides, sometimes becoming biennial, such 
as V. tricolor Linn6, represented on the left of our Plate ; and Alpine perennial 
varieties, such as Viola lutea Hudson. In V. tricolor Linn6 the pollen falls upon the 
anterior petal, but there is a little door-like flap at the lower edge of the stigmatic 
hollow. A visiting bee can bring pollen from another flower which will fall into the 
hole ; but as it leaves the flower, after sucking the honey from the spur, it must so 
close this flap that the flower’s own pollen cannot get to its stigma. The smaller- 
flowered V. arvensis Murray, in which, as is seen on our Plate, the petals are shorter 
