The goodness or badness of such work depends absolutely on the truth of the single line. You will find a thousand botanical drawings which will give you a {116} delicate and deceptive resemblance of the leaf, for one that will give you the right convexity in its backbone, the right perspective of its peaks when they foreshorten, or the right relation of depth in the shading of its dimples. On which, in leaves as in faces, no little expression of temper depends. Meantime we have yet to consider somewhat more touching that temper itself, in next chapter. * * * * * {117} CHAPTER VII. THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM. 1. I do not know if my readers were checked, as I wished them to be, at least for a moment, in the close of the last chapter, by my talking of thistles and dandelions changing into seaweed, by gradation of which, doubtless, Mr. Darwin can furnish us with specious and sufficient instances. But the two groups will not be contemplated in our Oxford system as in any parental relations whatsoever. We shall, however, find some very notable relations existing between the two groups of the wild flowers of dry land, which represent, in the widest extent, and the distinctest opposition, the two characters of material serviceableness and unserviceableness; the groups which in our English classification will be easily remembered as those of the Thyme, and the Daisy. The one, scented as with incense--medicinal--and in all gentle and humble ways, useful. The other, scentless--helpless for ministry to the body; infinitely dear as the bringer of light, ruby, white and gold; the three colours of the Day, with no hue of shade in it. Therefore I {118} take it on the coins of St. George for the symbol of the splendour or light of heaven, which is dearest where humblest. 2. Now these great two orders--of which the types are the thyme and the daisy--you are to remember generally as the 'Herbs' and the 'Sunflowers.' You are not to call them Lipped flowers, nor Composed flowers; because the first is a vulgar term; for when you once come to be able to draw a lip, or, in noble duty, to kiss one, you will know that no other flower in earth is like that: and the second is an indefinite term; for a foxglove is as much a 'composed' flower as a daisy; but it is composed in the shape of a spire, instead of the shape of the sun. And again a thistle, which common botany calls a composed flower, as well as a daisy, is composed in quite another shape, being on the whole, bossy instead of flat; and of another temper, or composition of mind, also, being connected in that respect with butterburs, and a vast company of rough, knotty, half-black or brown, and generally unluminous--flowers I can scarcely call them--and weeds I will not,--creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general name 'Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she returns to the day from the dead.