There is something touching in the gradual retirement before civilization of these delicate aborigines. They do not wait for the actual brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, but they feel the danger miles away. The Indians called the low plantain "the white man's footstep"; and these shy creatures gradually disappear, the moment the red man gets beyond their hearing. Bigelow's delightful "Florula Bostoniensis" is becoming a series of epitaphs. Too well we know it,--we who in happy Cambridge childhood often gathered, almost within a stone's throw of Professor Agassiz's new Museum, the arethusa and the gentian, the cardinal-flower and the gaudy rhexia,--we who remember the last secret hiding-place of the rhodora in West Cambridge, of the yellow violet and the _Viola debilis_ in Watertown, of the _Convallaria trifolia_ near Fresh Pond, of the _Hottonia_ beyond Wellington's Hill, of the _Cornus florida_ in West Roxbury, of the _Clintonia_ and the dwarf ginseng in Brookline,--we who have found in its one chosen nook the sacred _Andromeda polyfolia_ of Linnaeus. Now vanished almost or wholly from city-suburbs, these fragile creatures still linger in more rural parts of Massachusetts; but they are doomed everywhere, unconsciously, yet irresistibly; while others still more shy, as the _Linnoea_, the yellow _Cypripedium_, the early pink _Azalea_, and the delicate white _Corydalis_ or "Dutchman's breeches," are being chased into the very recesses of the Green and the White Mountains. The relics of the Indian tribes are supported by the legislature at Martha's Vineyard, while these precursors of the Indian are dying unfriended away.