This difference in the action and endurance of the flower and leaf had been applied by nearly all great nations as a type of the variously active and productive states of life among individuals or commonwealths. Chaucer's poem of the "Flower and Leaf" is the most definite expression of the mediaeval feeling in this respect, while the fables of the rape of Proserpine and of Apollo and Daphne embody that of the Greeks. There is no Greek goddess corresponding to the Flora of the Romans. Their Flora is Persephone, "the bringer of death." She plays for a little while in the Sicilian fields, gathering flowers, then snatched away by Pluto, receives her chief power as she vanishes from our sight, and is crowned in the grave. Daphne, on the other hand, is the daughter of one of the great Arcadian river gods, and of the earth; she is the type of the river mist filling the rocky vales of Arcadia; the sun, pursuing this mist from dell to dell, is Apollo pursuing Daphne; where the mist is protected from his rays by the rock shadows, the laurel and other richest vegetation spring by the river-sides, so that the laurel-leaf becomes the type, in the Greek mind, of the beneficent ministry and vitality of the rivers and the earth, under the beams of sunshine; and therefore it is chosen to form the signet-crown of highest honor for gods or men, honor for work born of the strength and dew of the earth and informed by the central light of heaven; work living, perennial, and beneficent. J. R. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 34: Read by Mr. Ruskin at the weekly evening meeting of the Royal Institution (see _Proceedings_, vol. iii., pp. 358-60), April 19, 1861.--ED.] ON THE FORMS OF THE STRATIFIED ALPS OF SAVOY.[35] 290. The purpose of the discourse was to trace some of the influences which have produced the present external forms of the stratified mountains of Savoy, and the probable extent and results of the future operation of such influences. The subject was arranged under three heads:-- I. The Materials of the Savoy Alps. II. The Mode of their Formation. III. The Mode of their subsequent Sculpture.