light by force through the unwilling green. They are often required to
retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long times
of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which some become
a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.

81. So, now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the herbs of
the field into three great groups,--Drosidæ, Carices,* Gramineæ,--
dew-plants, sedges, and grasses. Then the Drosidæ are divided into five
great orders: lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes. No
tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an
influence on man as this great group of Drosidæ, depending, not so much
on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as
on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their petals; enabling
them to take forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as the
crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the
hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or,
when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which
forms the labiate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely
fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid
sisters, the water-lilies, and you have them in the origin of the
loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the most powerful floral myths
yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile,
Arno, and Avon.


* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the
generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger
sub-species.