Then the spirit of these Draconidæ seems to pass more or less into other flowers, whose forms are properly pure vases; but it affects some of them slightly, others not at all. It never strongly affects the heaths; never once the roses; but it enters like an evil spirit into the buttercup, and turns it into a larkspur, with a black, spotted, grotesque centre, and a strange, broken blue, gorgeous and intense; yet impure, glittering on the surface as if it were strewn with broken glass, and stained or darkened irregularly into red. And then at last the serpent-charm changes the ranunculus into monkshood, and makes it poisonous. It enters into the forget-me-not, and the star of heavenly turquoise is corrupted into the viper’s bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn; it enters, together with a strange insect-spirit, into the asphodels, and (though with a greater interval between the groups), they change into spotted orchideæ; it touches the poppy, it becomes a fumaria; the iris, and it pouts into a gladiolus; the lily, and it checkers itself into a snake’s head, and secretes in the deep of its bell drops not of venom indeed, but honey-dew, as if it were a healing serpent. For there is an Æsculapian as well as an evil serpentry among the Draconidæ, and the fairest of them, “erba della Madonna” of Venice (Linaria Cymbalaria), descends from the ruins it delights in to the herbage at their feet, and touches it; and behold, instantly, a vast group of herbs for healing--all draconid in form--spotted and crested, and from their lip-like corollas named “labitæ”; full of various balm and warm strength for healing, yet all of them without splendid honor or perfect beauty, “ground ivies,” richest when crushed under the foot; the best sweetness and gentle brightness of the robes of the field--thyme, and marjoram, and euphrasy. And observe, again and again, with respect to all these divisions and powers of plants; it does not matter in the least by what concurrences of circumstance or necessity they may gradually have been developed: the concurrence of circumstance is itself the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come at last to a formative cause which directs the circumstance and mode of meeting it. If you ask an ordinary botanist the reason of the form of a leaf, he will tell you it is a “developed tubercle,” and that its ultimate form “is owing to the directions of its vascular threads.” But what directs its vascular threads? “They are seeking for something they want,” he will probably answer. What made them want that? What made them seek for it thus? Seek for it, in five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in serration, or in sweeping curves? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or impetuous spray? Seek for it, in woolen wrinkles rough with stings, or in glossy surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?