digestion. How far flowers invite, or require, flies to interfere in their family affairs—which of them are carnivorous—and what forms of pestilence or infection are most favourable to some vegetable and animal growths,—let them leave the people to settle who like, as Toinette says

of the Doctor in the 'Malade Imaginaire'—"y mettre le nez." I observe a paper in the last 'Contemporary Review,' announcing for a discovery patent to all mankind that the colours of flowers were made "to attract insects"!^[9] They will next hear that the rose was made for the canker, and the body of man for the worm.

43. What the colours of flowers, or of birds, or of precious stones, or of the sea and air, and the blue mountains, and the evening and the morning, and the clouds of Heaven, were given for—they only know who can see them and can feel, and who pray that the sight and the love of them may be prolonged, where cheeks will not fade, nor sunsets die.

44. And now, to close, let me give you some fuller account of the reasons for the naming of the order to which the violet belongs, 'Cytherides.'

You see that the Uranides, are, as far as I could so gather them, of the pure blue of the sky; but the Cytherides of altered blue;—the first, Viola, typically purple; the second, Veronica, pale blue with a peculiar light; the third, Giulietta, deep blue, passing strangely into a subdued green before and after the full life of the flower.

All these three flowers have great strangenesses in them, and weaknesses; the Veronica most wonderful in

its connection with the poisonous tribe of the foxgloves; the Giulietta, alone among flowers in the action of the shielding leaves; and the Viola, grotesque and inexplicable in its hidden structure, but the most sacred of all flowers to earthly and daily Love, both in its scent and glow.

Now, therefore, let us look completely for the meaning of the two leading lines,—