order, than another, without
the assumption of a divine law of perfection to which the one more conforms
than the other.

5. Thus, for instance. That it should ever have been an open question with
me whether a poppy had always {90} two of its petals less than the other
two, depended wholly on the hurry and imperfection with which the poppy
carries out its plan. It never would have occurred to me to {91} doubt
whether an iris had three of its leaves smaller than the other three,
because an iris always completes itself to its own ideal. Nevertheless, on
examining various poppies, as I have walked, this summer, up and down the
hills between Sheffield and Wakefield, I find the subordination of the
upper and lower petals entirely necessary and normal; and that the result
of it is to give two distinct profiles to the poppy cup, the difference
between which, however, we shall see better in the yellow Welsh poppy, at
present called Meconopsis Cambrica; but which, in the Oxford schools, will
be 'Papaver cruciforme'--'Crosslet Poppy,'--first, because all our
botanical names must be in Latin if possible; Greek only allowed when we
can do no better; secondly, because meconopsis is barbarous Greek; thirdly,
and chiefly, because it is little matter whether this poppy be Welsh or
English; but very needful that we should observe, wherever it grows, that
the petals are arranged in what used to be, in my young days, called a
diamond shape,[26] as at A, Fig. 10, the two narrow inner ones at right
angles to, and projecting farther than, the two outside broad ones; and
that the two broad ones, when the flower is seen in profile, as at B, show
their margins folded back, as indicated by the thicker lines, and have a
profile curve, which is only the softening, or melting away into each
other, of two straight lines. Indeed, when the flower is younger, and quite
strong, both its {92} profiles, A and B, Fig. 11, are nearly
straight-sided; and always, be it young or old, one broader than the other,
so as to give the flower, seen from above, the shape of a contracted cross,
or crosslet.

[Illustration: FIG. 11.]

6. Now I find no notice of this flower in Gerarde; and in Sowerby, out of
eighteen lines of closely printed descriptive text, no notice of its
crosslet form, while the petals are only stated to be "roundish-concave,"
terms equally applicable to at least one-half of all flower petals in the
{93} world. The leaves are _said_ to be very de