Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odours, and imparts then hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the sea side sands
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth.

_Cowper_.

In the eye of Utilitarianism the flowers are but idle shows. God might
indeed have made this world as plain as a Quaker's garment, without
retrenching one actual necessary of physical existence; but He has
chosen otherwise; and no earthly potentate was ever so richly clad as
his mother earth. "Behold the lilies of the field, they spin not,
neither do they toil, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these!" We are thus instructed that man was not meant to live by
bread alone, and that the gratification of a sense of beauty is equally
innocent and natural and refining. The rose is permitted to spread its
sweet leaves to the air and dedicate its beauty to the sun, in a way
that is quite perplexing to bigots and stoics and political economists.
Yet God has made nothing in vain! The Great Artist of the Universe must
have scattered his living hues and his forms of grace over the surface
of the earth for some especial and worthy purpose. When Voltaire was
congratulated on the rapid growth of his plants, he observed that "_they
had nothing else to do_." Oh, yes--they had something else to do,--they
had to adorn the earth, and to charm the human eye, and through the eye
to soften and cheer the heart and elevate the soul!

I have often wished that Lecturers on Botany, instead of confining their