r rose, and assigning to them pure Latin, and pretty
English, names,--classical, if possible; and at least intelligible and
decorous.

8. I return to our present special question, then, What is a poppy? and
return also to a book I gave away long ago, and have just begged back
again, Dr. Lindley's 'Ladies' Botany.' For without at all looking upon
ladies as inferior beings, I dimly hope that what Dr. Lindley considers
likely to be intelligible to _them_, may be also clear to their very humble
servant.

The poppies, I find, (page 19, vol. i.) differ from crowfeet in being of a
stupifying instead of a burning nature, and in generally having two sepals
and twice two petals; "but as some poppies have three sepals, and twice
three petals, the number of these parts is not sufficiently constant to
form an essential mark." Yes, I know that, for I found a superb six-petaled
poppy, spotted like a cistus, the other day in a friend's garden. But then,
what makes it a poppy still? That it is of a stupifying nature, and itself
so stupid that it does not know how many petals it should have, is surely
not enough distinction?

9. Returning to Lindley, and working the matter {96} farther out with his
help, I think this definition might stand. "A poppy is a flower which has
either four or six petals, and two or more treasuries, united into one;
containing a milky, stupifying fluid in its stalks and leaves, and always
throwing away its calyx when it blossoms."

And indeed, every flower which unites all these characters, we shall, in
the Oxford schools, call 'poppy,' and 'Papaver;' but when I get fairly into
work, I hope to fix my definitions into more strict terms. For I wish all
my pupils to form the habit of asking, of every plant, these following four
questions, in order, corresponding to the subject of these opening
chapters, namely, "What root has it? what leaf? what flower? and what
stem?" And, in this definition of poppies, nothing whatever is said about
the root; and not only I don't know myself what a poppy root is like, but
in all Sowerby's poppy section, I find no word whatever about that matter.

10. Leaving, however, for the present, the root unthought of, and
contenting myself with Dr. Lindley's characteristics, I shall place, at the
head of the whole group, our common European wild poppy, Papaver Rhoeas,
and, with this, arrange the nine following other flowers thus,--opposite.

I must be content at present with determinin