which I observed, ten or fifteen versts distant,
surrounded with green, orange, and crimson."[227]

The microscope, too, will bring out beauties in flowers which the
unassisted eye is incompetent fully to recognise. If we take a scarlet
Geranium, or a purple Heartsease, the eye is delighted with the
brilliancy of the colouring; but on placing a petal of either on a slip
of glass, under a pretty high magnifying power, and reflecting the full
rays of the sun through the object, the rich gorgeousness of the hue,
the sparkling gem-like radiance of the surface, and the
exquisitely-regular form of the round cells, with their clear
interstices, form a spectacle of glorious beauty that almost surpasses
the conception of one who has not seen it.

I shall close this chapter, which might easily have been expanded into a
volume, with a reference to an humble and minute plant, whose fairy
loveliness, combined with an almost unkillable hardiness of
constitution, has won for it a place in every garden, however
unpretending, and however ungenial in its locality,--the London-pride.
This exquisite little Saxifrage, general favourite as it is, requires
the microscope to bring out its beauties to advantage, but under a good
instrument you cannot fail to be charmed with it. I have one before me
at this moment, and will describe what I see.

First, I notice, on a cursory glance, that the whole plant is clothed
with tiny hairs; I take one of the flower-stalks and examine these with
a power of three hundred diameters. Each now becomes a stem of
glass-like clearness, tapering upwards to a point, where it bears a
richly crimson cup, and in this is seated a globule of colourless
glass, just as an acorn sits in its shell. The multitude of these
organs--glandular hairs, the botanist calls them--standing up side by
side, rising to varying heights, and displaying various degrees of
development, is a very pleasing sight.

I turn to an unopened bud, putting on a lower power, and viewing it as
an opaque object, with reflected light by the aid of the Lieberkuhn.
Here are the parting sepals of the calyx, painted with rose-pink and
pea-green, and studded all over with the knobbed hairs just noticed; the
coloured surface is rough with granules, but it is the roughness of
glass, for every knob gleams and sparkles with light. The corolla, a
little white ball, displays its petals smoothly folded over each other,
and their surface has the same appearance o