s, for instance, Line-study 1. You might think at first
there were no lines in it worth study; but look at it more carefully. There
are twelve bells in the {68} cluster. There may be fewer, or more; but the
bog-heath is apt to run into something near that number. They all grow
together as close as they can, and on one side of the supporting branch
only. The natural effect would be to bend the branch down; but the branch
won't have that, and so leans back to carry them. Now you see the use of
drawing the profile in the middle figure: it shows you the exactly balanced
setting of the group,--not drooping, nor erect; but with a disposition to
droop, tossed up by the leaning back of the stem. Then, growing as near as
they can to each other, those in the middle get squeezed. Here is another
quite special character. Some flowers don't like being squeezed at all
(fancy a squeezed convolvulus!); but these heather bells like it, and look
all the prettier for it,--not the squeezed ones exactly, by themselves, but
the cluster altogether, by their patience.

Then also the outside ones get pushed into a sort of star-shape, and in
front show the colour of all their sides, and at the back the rich green
cluster of sharp leaves that hold them; all this order being as essential
to the plant as any of the more formal structures of the bell itself.

6. But the bog-heath has usually only one cluster of flowers to arrange on
each branch. Take a spray of ling (Frontispiece), and you will find that
the richest piece of Gothic spire-sculpture would be dull and graceless
beside the grouping of the floral masses in their various life. But it is
difficult to give the accuracy of attention {69} necessary to see their
beauty without drawing them; and still more difficult to draw them in any
approximation to the truth before they change. This is indeed the fatallest
obstacle to all good botanical work. Flowers, or leaves,--and especially
the last,--can only be rightly drawn as they grow. And even then, in their
loveliest spring action, they grow as you draw them, and will not stay
quite the same creatures for half an hour.

7. I said in my inaugural lectures at Oxford, Sec. 107, that real botany is
not so much the description of plants as their biography. Without entering
at all into the history of its fruitage, the life and death of the blossom
_itself_ is always an eventful romance, which must be completely told, if
well. The grouping given to the