sting titles belonging to it and its fellows, that I may
keep all I expediently can. I find, in the first place, that Linnaeus called
one group of its relations, Ophryds, from Ophrys,--Greek for the
eyebrow,--on account of their resemblance to the brow of an animal
frowning, or to the overshadowing casque of a helmet. I perceive this to be
really a very general aspect of the flower; and therefore, no less than in
respect to Linnaeus, I adopt this for the total name of the order, and call
them 'Ophrydae,' or, shortly, 'Ophryds.'

8. Secondly: so far as I know these flowers myself, I perceive them to fall
practically into three divisions,--one, growing in English meadows and
Alpine pastures, and always adding to their beauty; another, growing in all
sorts of places, very ugly itself, and adding to the ugliness of its
indiscriminated haunts; and a third, growing mostly up in the air, with as
little root as possible, and of gracefully fantastic forms, such as this
kind of nativity and habitation might presuppose. For the present, I am
satisfied to give names to these three groups only. There may be plenty of
others which I do not know, and which other people may name, according to
their knowledge. But in all these three kinds known to me, I perceive one
constant characteristic to be _some_ manner of _distortion_ and I desire
that fact,--marking a {181} spiritual (in my sense of the word) character
of extreme mystery,--to be the first enforced on the mind of the young
learner. It is exhibited to the English child, primarily, in the form of
the stalk of each flower, attaching it to the central virga. This stalk is
always twisted once and a half round, as if somebody had been trying to
wring the blossom off; and the name of the family, in Proserpina, will
therefore be 'Contorta'[49] in Latin, and 'Wreathe-wort' in English.

Farther: the beautiful power of the one I have drawn in its spring life, is
in the opposition of its dark purple to the primrose in England, and the
pale yellow anemone in the Alps. And its individual name will be,
therefore, 'Contorta purpurea'--_Purple_ Wreathe-wort.

And in drawing it, I take care to dwell on this strength of its color, and
to show thoroughly that it is a _dark_ blossom,[50] before I trouble myself
about its minor characters.

9. The second group of this kind of flowers live, as I said, in all sorts
of places; but mostly, I think, in disagreeable ones,--torn and irregular
ground, under