For profusion of bloom and brilliancy of coloring, the land of the tropics, with all its luxuriance of vegetation, can offer nothing to compare with a New England meadow in June. Along the great rivers of the South or in the islands of the East strange and beautiful flowers occur individually or in small groups, but the traveler looks in vain for myriads of blossoms giving a distinctive coloring to the landscape itself. It was long the popular notion that the colors of flowers were of no importance except as they gave human pleasure. This idea has been made familiar by a well-known line of Gray's Elegy. It was a German pastor, Christian Conrad Sprengel, at the close of the last century, who first pointed out their true significance. So enthusiastically did he pursue his botanical studies that he neglected the duties of his office, and finally even omitted the Sunday sermon. The natural result followed, that he was deprived of his parish. In straitened circumstances he then sought unsuccessfully to maintain himself at Berlin by giving lessons in botany and Sunday excursions in search of plants. His book, now a botanical classic, attracted but little attention; his publisher did not even send him a copy of it, and in disgust he turned from the study of plants to that of languages. The title of the work, The Secret of Nature in the Form and Fertilization of Flowers Discovered, affords us the pleasure of knowing that he rightly estimated the importance of his observations. Sprengel clearly states that the bright hues of flowers, as is now well established, serve as signals to attract the attention of nectar-loving insects flying near by. He was led to this conclusion very fitly by the study of _Myosotis_, the "forget-me-not." He has not been forgotten. His name and theory were rescued from obscurity by Darwin; his book a few years ago was reprinted at Leipsic, and is now universally recognized, says H. Müller, as having "struck out a new path in botanical science." A day's stroll through the fields and woodlands is sufficient to show that yellow and white blossoms are in Nature more common than red or blue. From an examination of 741 New England and Eastern species belonging to 48 families (see table) it appears that 164 are yellow, 283 white, 71 red, 136 blue and purple, and 87 green. Greenish flowers occur in 25 families, yellow in 29, white in 32, red in 16, purple and blue in 22. _The Predominant Colors of the Flowers of Ranunculaceæ to Cornaceæ in the Northern States._