The world, truly seen and understood, is but another showing forth of human nature, an echo of its lord and master, reiterating in its various and beautiful structures, colours, and configurations, what in him are thoughts and passions, and in the forget-me-not we have one of the foremost witnesses. This is no loose and misty speculation; but to the earnest student of nature who looks below the surface of things, a determinate and palpable fact, the source of the most fascinating pleasures that connect themselves with the genuine knowledge of plants and flowers, and of the objects of nature universally. The peculiarity referred to consists principally in the curious spiral stalk, and the store of secret buds, a new flower opening fresh and fresh every day as the stalk uncoils. It may be added, as furnishing another example of the variety in the distribution of plants, that the forget-me-not, like the arum, is wanting on the Prestwich side of the town, while the sylvan horsetail, so abundant in Mere Clough, is comparatively a stranger to the valley of the Bollin. To young people who have the opportunity of exploring the respective places, independently of the large local knowledge they acquire, it is a most instructive employment to note these phenomena, for they are all more or less intimately connected with the grandest and widest laws of physical geography--the great, as we have shown before, represented in the little--and no science will be found in after life more thoroughly entertaining or more practically useful. Besides these more choice and remarkable flowers, there are in Cotterill Wood at this period anemones and bluebells without end; while in the upper part, accessible by the path before-mentioned, and which should on no account be left unvisited, the firs and larches are at the acme of their floral pride. The flowers of these trees, like those of the hazel and alder, are some of them only male, others only female. The female flowers in due time become the seed-cones, announcing them from afar; the male flowers likewise assume the cone form, but as soon as the purpose of their being is accomplished, they wither and drop off. In the larch, the females are of a delicate pink, contrasting exquisitely with the tender green of the young tufted leaves, and conspicuous from their large size, the males being comparatively small, though noticeable from their immense abundance. In the firs, on the other hand, we are attracted rather by the male flowers, which are of a beautiful reddish buff, and on the slightest blow being given to the branch, shed clouds of their fertilising dust.