But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to
entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are
meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens,
therefore--to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged
wasps in it,--and perceive therewith the following particulars.

9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a
little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is
grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old
fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out
in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of
fringe.

Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white
hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose
of use or decoration--any more than a hearth-brush put for a
helmet-crest,--and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower
petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw,
edged with ghastly teeth,--and yet more, that the hollow within begins to
suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections
where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen
glands.

I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close
observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to
physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by
imagination. Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat
affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant,
Brunelle.