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Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers by John Ruskin
page 42 of 120 (35%)
pansy); the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima,
No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part
the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a
slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end."
(Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead,
the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)

The pale one is commonly called 'Lusitanica,' but I find no direct notice
of its Portuguese habitation. Sowerby's plant came from Blandford,
Dorsetshire; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran,
and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape
Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is
found.

[Illustration: FIG. III.]

5. Pinguicula Minima: Least Butterwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the
_scape_ of it being hairy. I have not yet got rid of this absurd word
'scape,' meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing
out of a cluster of leaves on the ground. It is a bad corruption of
'sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is
necessarily branched.[15] In 'Proserpina,' when it is spoken of
distinctively, it is called 'virgula' (see vol. i., pp. 146, 147, 151,
152). The hairs on the virgula are in this instance so minute, that even
with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish plate: of which Fig. 3 is a
rough translation into woodcut, to show the grace and mien of the little
thing. The trine leaf cluster is characteristic, and the folding up of the
leaf edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. Abundant in east
of _Finmark_ (Finland?), but _always growing in marsh moss_, (Sphagnum
palustre).
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