4. First, the order: the proportion, and answering to each other, of the parts; for the study of which it becomes necessary to know what its parts are; and that a flower consists essentially of--Well, I really don't know what it consists essentially of. For some flowers have bracts, and stalks, and toruses, and calices, and corollas, and discs, and stamens, and pistils, and ever so many odds and ends of things besides, of no use at all, seemingly; and others have no bracts, and no stalks, and no toruses, and no calices, and no corollas, and nothing recognizable for stamens or pistils,--only, when they come to be reduced to this kind of poverty, one doesn't call {67} them flowers; they get together in knots, and one calls them catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence altogether;--I haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, what an oak blossom is like; only I know its bracts get together and make a cup of themselves afterwards, which the Italians call, as they do the dome of St. Peter's, 'cupola'; and that it is a great pity, for their own sake as well as the world's, that they were not content with their ilex cupolas, which were made to hold something, but took to building these big ones upside-down, which hold nothing--_less_ than nothing,--large extinguishers of the flame of Catholic religion. And for farther embarrassment, a flower not only is without essential consistence of a given number of parts, but it rarely consists, alone, of _itself_. One talks of a hyacinth as of a flower; but a hyacinth is any number of flowers. One does not talk of 'a heather'; when one says 'heath,' one means the whole plant, not the blossom,--because heath-bells, though they grow together for company's sake, do so in a voluntary sort of way, and are not fixed in their places; and yet, they depend on each other for effect, as much as a bunch of grapes.