7. I said in my inaugural lectures at Oxford, Sec. 107, that real botany is not so much the description of plants as their biography. Without entering at all into the history of its fruitage, the life and death of the blossom _itself_ is always an eventful romance, which must be completely told, if well. The grouping given to the various states of form between bud and flower is always the most important part of the design of the plant; and in the modes of its death are some of the most touching lessons, or symbolisms, connected with its existence. The utter loss and far-scattered ruin of the cistus and wild rose,--the dishonoured and dark contortion of the convolvulus,--the pale wasting of the crimson heath of Apennine, are strangely opposed by the quiet closing of the brown bells of the ling, each making of themselves a little cross as they die; and so enduring into the days of winter. I have drawn the faded beside the full branch, and know not which is the more beautiful. 8. This grouping, then, and way of treating each other in their gathered company, is the first and most subtle {70} condition of form in flowers; and, observe, I don't mean, just now, the appointed and disciplined grouping, but the wayward and accidental. Don't confuse the beautiful consent of the cluster in these sprays of heath with the legal strictness of a foxglove,--though that also has its divinity; but of another kind. That legal order of blossoming--for which we may wisely keep the accepted name, 'inflorescence,'--is itself quite a separate subject of study, which we cannot take up until we know the still more strict laws which are set over the flower itself. 9. I have in my hand a small red poppy which I gathered on Whit Sunday on the palace of the Caesars. It is an intensely simple, intensely floral, flower. All silk and flame: a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen among the wild grass far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven's altars. You cannot have a more complete, a more stainless, type of flower absolute; inside and outside, _all_ flower. No sparing of colour anywhere--no outside coarsenesses--no interior secrecies; open as the sunshine that creates it; fine-finished on both sides, down to the extremest point of insertion on its narrow stalk; and robed in the purple of the Caesars. Literally so. That poppy scarlet, so far as it could be painted by mortal hand, for mortal King, stays yet, against the sun, and wind, and rain, on the walls of the house of Augustus, a hundred yards from the spot where I gathered the weed of its desolation.