Part 34

I shall close this chapter, which might easily have been expanded into a volume, with a reference to an humble and minute plant, whose fairy loveliness, combined with an almost unkillable hardiness of constitution, has won for it a place in every garden, however unpretending, and however ungenial in its locality,--the London-pride. This exquisite little Saxifrage, general favourite as it is, requires the microscope to bring out its beauties to advantage, but under a good instrument you cannot fail to be charmed with it. I have one before me at this moment, and will describe what I see.

First, I notice, on a cursory glance, that the whole plant is clothed with tiny hairs; I take one of the flower-stalks and examine these with a power of three hundred diameters. Each now becomes a stem of glass-like clearness, tapering upwards to a point, where it bears a richly crimson cup, and in this is seated a globule of colourless glass, just as an acorn sits in its shell. The multitude of these organs--glandular hairs, the botanist calls them--standing up side by side, rising to varying heights, and displaying various degrees of development, is a very pleasing sight.

I turn to an unopened bud, putting on a lower power, and viewing it as an opaque object, with reflected light by the aid of the Lieberkuhn. Here are the parting sepals of the calyx, painted with rose-pink and pea-green, and studded all over with the knobbed hairs just noticed; the coloured surface is rough with granules, but it is the roughness of glass, for every knob gleams and sparkles with light. The corolla, a little white ball, displays its petals smoothly folded over each other, and their surface has the same appearance of granular glass as that of the calyx.

But now let me examine this blossom just expanded this morning,--the very first of the season, by the way. I must have a low power for this, eighty diameters, or so. Oh, how exquisite! The little saucer of five oval petals, each of snowy whiteness, bearing its bow of lovely crimson specks, with a spot of gamboge-yellow for the chord, and the whole sparkling with glassy points as before. The pale red germen in the centre, rising into two points of snow, their rosy tips pressed close together, as if the twins were kissing. The ten stamens, five short alternating with five long ones, and each bearing its pretty kidney-shaped anther of pale scarlet. No; all are not kidney-shaped; for here is one which has burst, and the grains of red pollen are seen covering its rough purple surface; and here is one stamen from the point of which the anther has gone, leaving only two or three pollen-grains adhering. Behind all, I see the sepals of the calyx, peeping out between the petals, and forming a fine dark background for them, and for the longer filaments.

And now I say to my readers, one and all,--you may not have the opportunity to examine the glorious tropical Orchids, or the gorgeous Flamboyant, but go and pluck a flower of the London-pride, and you will have before your eyes such a production of Divine handiwork as may well excite the admiration and adoration of an angel.

Rev. v. 11.

Edwards's Voyage up the Amazon, 194.

Travels on the Amazon and Negro, 222.

Voy. à la Nouv. Guinée.

Amer. Ornith.

Edwards's Voy. up the Amazon, 143.

Martial, xiii. 72.

Windsor Forest.

See Good Words for April 1861.

Wordsworth.

Wanderings in N. S. Wales, &c., ii. 43.

Zool., 3060.

Low's Sarawak, 87.

Tennent's Ceylon, i. 250.

Ellis's Visit to Madagascar, 313.

Nat. Voyage, ch. xviii.

Pöppig.--Nov. Gen. et Sp., i. 54.

Lindley's Sertum Orchid.; pi. xxvi.

Himal. Journ., ii. 58.

Himal. Journals, i. 126.

Low's Sarawak, 65.

The writer by this term doubtless alludes to the panicles or heads compounded of many individual flowers; for the plant does not belong to the order Compositæ, but to Byttneriaceæ.

Ellis's Madagascar, p. 390.