bite, or ill-breeding; they never suggest the idea of improving themselves,
now, into anything better; one is only afraid of their tearing or puffing
themselves into something worse. Nay, even the quite natural and simple
conditions of inferior vegetable do not in the least suggest, to the
unbitten or unblighted human intellect, the notion of development into
anything other than their like: one does not expect a mushroom to translate
itself into a pineapple, nor a betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a
snapdragon to soften himself into a lilac.

8. It is very possible, indeed, that the recent phrenzy for the
investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by
this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with
providentially disgusting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for
every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth,
or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the
dissolution, of vegetable organism. But with these obscene processes and
prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing
whatever to do. I am amazed and saddened, more than I can care to say, by
finding how much that is abominable may be discovered by an ill-taught
curiosity, in the purest things that earth is allowed to produce for
us;--perhaps if we were less reprobate in our own ways, the grass which is
our type might conduct itself better, even though _it_ has no hope but of
being cast into the oven; in the meantime, healthy human eyes and thoughts
are to be set on the lovely laws of its growth and habitation, and not on
the mean mysteries of its birth.

9. I relieve, therefore, our presently inquiring souls from any farther
care as to the reason for a violet's spur,--or for the extremely ugly
arrangements of its stamens and style, invisible unless by vexatious and
vicious peeping. You are to think of a violet only in its green leaves, and