Here let us pause, and propound a question.
How would you propose to test the real character, the genuine nature, of friend or acquaintance?
Your answers, dear readers (believe me, I hear them clearly!), are very various. Some of you say, that the best means of sounding the depths of the human heart is by bringing before it a misery which needs to be relieved. Others recommend the bestowal of a benefit. But such processes of analysis appear to me far from being infallible; too wide a margin is left for the operation of sentiments of pride or vanity. Why not conduct the man whose real character you wish to discover into a meadow enamelled with sparkling daisies? Thus you would impose upon nature the task of interrogating him. If he manifest feelings of indifference, you will do well to regard him with suspicion: take care how you admit him into your intimacy; for his heart must be cold, and his mind troubled—
"The man that takes not daisies to his soul
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."
But to return to our daisy. Observe how, by its organs, it yields itself—in anticipation, as it were—to its fate. And, first, its long and fibrous roots anchor it so solidly in the soil that the cattle which browse it cannot tear it up. Next, its stem is so short that it seems to be blended with the roots; one might almost doubt whether any existed. But, if you look at it more closely, you may readily assure yourself that the stem is the point whence issue the recumbent branches which bear the leaves. Why does not the daisy boast of stems erect and free? Would they not be incessantly bent or broken by the merry troops of children who love to play and dance upon Nature's carpet, the soft green sward?
The leaves of our daisy, then, seem to issue directly from the roots, without the intermediary of an apparent stem, which must not be confounded—recollect this, dear reader!—with the stalk or peduncle that bears the crown of petals. These leaves in form resemble tiny crenelated spatules, with the handles flattened, and the edges trimmed with little hairs or fibres. The peduncle, too, seems to start immediately from the roots. The principal part of the peduncle is surmounted, as already hinted, by the flower, to which we next direct our inquisitive and searching gaze.
What shall we call it? To what shall we liken it? To a gilded button framed in a pearl. This button, this "yellow eye," as Tabernæmontanus, a botanist of the sixteenth century, named it,—the "eye of day" of our old poets,—a drop of gold in a rim of silver,—is not like any other flower; is quite a world or system of Lilliputian blossoms, each of which is represented by a miniature tube, yellow at the summit, and of a greenish white at the base,—the said tube being the union, or combination, of the tops or summits forming the central gem, the gilded button, the drop of gold. You may readily note this arrangement in the larger variety of daisy, the Chrysanthemum leucanthum of Linnæus,—two Latinised Greek words which signify, literally, "golden-blossomed white flower."
If you doubt whether each of these tiny tubes be a flower, you have only to analyse them with the assistance of your ever-useful lens. The analysis of one will suffice; for all the others resemble it. Now, with your penknife, split the tube throughout its entire length: you will thus lay bare all the parts which enter into the composition of a veritable flower, commencing with the most conspicuous. Through the magnifying glass you can see five stamens,—free as regards their short filaments, but united by their elongated anthers; a characteristic which gives name to the great family of the Synantheraceæ, of which family our daisy is an honoured member;—a bifid (i.e., cloven in two) style traversing the middle of the anthers, which form for it a kind of sheath (see Fig. 31, a);—a monopetalous, tubular, and obscurely bilabiated (two-lipped) corolla, inserted at the summit of an unilocular (one-lobed) ovary, which is attached to the calyx (see Fig. 31, b). In these tiny flowers, then, which we call in Latin flosculi, in French fleurons, in English florets, nothing is deficient. As they are shaped like tubes, we call them, by way of distinction, tubulifloral.