But more beautiful still than the yellow Œnotheras is the white _Œnothera taraxicifolia_, the evening primrose of the dandelion leaf. I have a bed of standard roses which I have carpeted entirely with this Œnothera. It grows low to the ground, and its leaves, which are deeply serrated, cover the bed. In the daytime there are the relics of the last night’s harvest of blossom, but the flowers look faded, and soon get a pink flush over the white—after which they wither away. But to-night the fresh blooms are out, and I count from sixty to seventy of them, like stars, some in clusters and some gleaming singly from the mass of deep foliage. There is, it almost seems to me, a positive light about them which no other white flower has, not even the Eucharis or the Christmas rose. And then the blossoms are so large when fully open—at least three inches across the petals. This Œnothera is from Chili, but the yellow one comes from North America; and a smaller yellow one, also from North America, may be found naturalized and now quite wild in one or two places in England. The name Œnothera (properly, I suppose, Œnothēra) is said to have been given because the root smelt of wine; but if it is uncertain what the Greek Œnothera really was, certainly no old Greek could know anything of these beautiful blossoms of our Western night. “Sir John Lubbock says that the evening primrose is probably fertilized by moths, and it would seem at first sight most likely that this should be the case. To-night—for the air, as I have said, is quite still and warm—is just the night that I should expect the moths to be at work; but after long waiting near a large yellow Œnothera (the one plant had forty blooms), I did not see one single moth. I returned to the bed of _Œnothera taraxicifolia_, and again I could see no moth of any kind. Meanwhile, a little further off, among a bed of white Mediterranean heath, which is just as much in flower by day as it is now, there are several of these wanderers of the night—little brown moths of (I think) two different varieties. There and there alone, and not among the large open blossoms of the Œnotheras, or among the delicate tufts of night-scented stock, were the moths busily engaged. Why, then, do these night-flowers—if it be not to attract night insects, and so get fertilized—expand their petals as evening falls? We have, I suspect, a good deal yet to learn on these matters. Even the two Œnotheras are very unlike in several respects. The seed-vessel of the _Œnothera taraxicifolia_ is at the end of a long tube, some seven inches in length, down which runs the stalk or style of the pistil, and within this tube I have constantly found little black flies and grains of pollen. Moreover, the pistil and the stamens of this Œnothera are as nearly as possible the same length; so that even before the flower has opened, a stigma or head of the pistil has got well dusted over with the pollen of the stamens.