conditions,—rather smaller than the average, indeed, that I might get it well into my plate. It is one of the flowers whose names I think good to change; but I look carefully through the existing titles belonging to it and its fellows, that I may keep all I expediently can. I find, in the first place, that Linnæus called one group of its relations, Ophryds, from Ophrys,—Greek for the eyebrow,—on account of their resemblance to the brow of an animal frowning, or to the overshadowing casque of a helmet. I perceive this to be really a very general aspect of the flower; and therefore, no less than in respect to Linnæus, I adopt this for the total name of the order, and call them 'Ophrydæ,' or, shortly, 'Ophryds.'
8. Secondly: so far as I know these flowers myself, I perceive them to fall practically into three divisions,—one, growing in English meadows and Alpine pastures, and always adding to their beauty; another, growing in all sorts of places, very ugly itself, and adding to the ugliness of its indiscriminated haunts; and a third, growing mostly up in the air, with as little root as possible, and of gracefully fantastic forms, such as this kind of nativity and habitation might presuppose. For the present, I am satisfied to give names to these three groups only. There may be plenty of others which I do not know, and which other people may name, according to their knowledge. But in all these three kinds known to me, I perceive one constant characteristic to be some manner of distortion and I desire that fact,—marking a
spiritual (in my sense of the word) character of extreme mystery,—to be the first enforced on the mind of the young learner. It is exhibited to the English child, primarily, in the form of the stalk of each flower, attaching it to the central virga. This stalk is always twisted once and a half round, as if somebody had been trying to wring the blossom off; and the name of the family, in Proserpina, will therefore be 'Contorta'[[49]] in Latin, and 'Wreathe-wort' in English.
Farther: the beautiful power of the one I have drawn in its spring life, is in the opposition of its dark purple to the primrose in England, and the pale yellow anemone in the Alps. And its individual name will be, therefore, 'Contorta purpurea'—Purple Wreathe-wort.
And in drawing it, I take care to dwell on this strength of its color, and to show thoroughly that it is a dark blossom,[[50]] before I trouble myself about its minor characters.
9. The second group of this kind of flowers live, as I said, in all sorts of places; but mostly, I think, in disagreeable ones,—torn and irregular ground, under alternations of unwholesome heat and shade, and among swarms of nasty insects. I cannot yet venture on any bold general statement about them, but I think that is mostly their way; and at all events, they themselves are in the
habit of dressing in livid and unpleasant colors; and are distinguished from all other flowers by twisting, not only their stalks, but one of their petals, not once and a half only, but two or three times round, and putting it far out at the same time, as a foul jester would put out his tongue: while also the singular power of grotesque mimicry, which, though strong also in the other groups of their race, seems in the others more or less playful, is, in these, definitely degraded, and, in aspect, malicious.
10. Now I find the Latin name 'Satyrium' attached already to one sort of these flowers; and we cannot possibly have a better one for all of them. It is true that, in its first Greek form, Dioscorides attaches it to a white, not a livid, flower; and I dare say there are some white ones of the breed: but, in its full sense, the term is exactly right for the entire group of ugly blossoms of which the characteristic is the spiral curve and protraction of their central petal: and every other form of Satyric ugliness which I find among the Ophryds, whatever its color, will be grouped with them. And I make them central, because this humour runs through the whole order, and is, indeed, their distinguishing sign.
11. Then the third group, living actually in the air, and only holding fast by, without nourishing itself from, the ground, rock, or tree-trunk on which it is rooted, may of course most naturally and accurately be called 'Aeria,' as it has long been popularly known in English by the name of Air-plant.