A Word for Books 
flowering-dogwood, 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 
myriad different 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 few. Even if it led to 
nothing but a knowledge of the delight which 
Nature takes in making the tiniest features 
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