ubies; nor a flower, but in
collateral and added honour, to give birth to other flowers.

Two main facts, then, you have to study in every flower: the symmetry or
order of it, and the perfection of its substance; first, the manner in
which the leaves are placed for beauty of form; then the spinning and
weaving and blanching of their tissue, for the reception of purest colour,
or refining to richest surface.

4. First, the order: the proportion, and answering to each other, of the
parts; for the study of which it becomes necessary to know what its parts
are; and that a flower consists essentially of--Well, I really don't know
what it consists essentially of. For some flowers have bracts, and stalks,
and toruses, and calices, and corollas, and discs, and stamens, and
pistils, and ever so many odds and ends of things besides, of no use at
all, seemingly; and others have no bracts, and no stalks, and no toruses,
and no calices, and no corollas, and nothing recognizable for stamens or
pistils,--only, when they come to be reduced to this kind of poverty, one
doesn't call {67} them flowers; they get together in knots, and one calls
them catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence altogether;--I
haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, what an oak blossom is like;
only I know its bracts get together and make a cup of themselves
afterwards, which the Italians call, as they do the dome of St. Peter's,
'cupola'; and that it is a great pity, for their own sake as well as the
world's, that they were not content with their ilex cupolas, which were
made to hold something, but took to building these big ones upside-down,
which hold nothing--_less_ than nothing,--large extinguishers of the flame
of Catholic religion. And for farther embarrassment, a flower not only is
without essential consistence of a given number of parts, but it rarely
consists, alone, of _itself_. One talks of a hyacinth as of a flower; but a
hyacinth is any number of flowers. One does not talk of 'a heather'; when
one says 'heath,' one means the whole plant, not the blossom,--because
heath-bells, though they grow together for company's sake, do so in a
voluntary sort of way, and are not fixed in their places; and yet, they
depend on each other for effect, as much as a bunch of grapes.

5. And this grouping of flowers, more or less waywardly, is the most subtle
part of their order, and the most difficult to represent. Take that cluster
of bog-heather bell