(XXIII) 
“Artificial Flowers” themselves, of whatever material fabricated, besides 
paying homage*, by their elegant substitution, to the absent charms of Nature, 
will, on the one hand, warn us to trust but little to the unreal; and, on the other, 
will admonish us, if aught of resource avail, to do our best amid actual circum¬ 
stances, in improving the arts of living. We then act just as artists, who will 
freely borrow some needed conceits from plant-types, in which they are more at 
liberty than elsewhere to be realistic in imitating Nature; the sculptor, when 
carving wreath or wealth of foliage for statue or pedestal, for plinth or obelisk; 
the designer, when tracing the veinous grains of wood-fibers, or embellishments 
for “storied windows richly dight,” or yet the symbolic group* of wheaten stalk 
with the “full corn in the ear” and the blooded grape-vine with sinuous grace of 
curve, intermingled with the flower of the field and the lily of the valley; the 
painter when depicting vine or flower on models for screen, and varied tapestry, 
and draping valance; the architect when duplicating in relief a rose, or leaf, or 
bushy fringe, for altar panel, or fretted vault, or broad entablature ;—all are glad 
to be indebted to the glories of floriculture for certain of their happiest exhibitions 
of true mimetic art, in furtherance of our instruction and enjoyment. 
And the educating power of the plant-world lends itself to the sciences 
also. The chemist and the pharmacist learn thence of acids, and alkalies, and 
vegetal essences, of dyestuffs, gums and resins, and the secrets of compounding 
healing drugs. The mineralogist, by his study of fossilized herbal forms, recog¬ 
nizes, through their actual condensed and carbonized state, their primitive organ¬ 
isms lustily vital long centuries agone, and with delight his eye glistens even as 
the “black” or the white diamond that has thus been conclusively traced to its 
origin; while he also successfully analyses and labels the long pent-up gas and 
fluid that have so valuably ministered to modern industries and convenience. The 
geologist, too, willingly inspects the petrified remains of the same once teemful 
vegetation, secreted in deepening strata, and, just as in the “testimony of the 
rocks,” he here satisfactorily discovers those chronometric readings which unriddle 
the story of the formative ages of our globe. 
Some plants and flowers there are that teach negatively, deprecatingly; the 
Poppy would deter us from unnatural excitation, and from the reactionary lethar¬ 
gy or torpor of consequent indifferentism; and the Lotus, beautiful as it is and 
*The key to the meaning of the frontispiece designed for this book, is found in the 
mystical scriptural references to the bread that confirmeth the heart and the wine that re- 
joiceth, and maketh virgins, because in Him, the verily Hidden God, whose delights are to be 
with the children of men, of whom He became one in the field and valley of humanity, there 
to nourish them and feed with them among the lilies. 
