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 {182} 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. {183}

Thus we have one general name for all these creatures, 'Ophryd'; and three
family or group names, Contorta, Satyrium, and Aeria,--every one of these
titles containing as much accurate fact about the thing named as I can
possibly get packed into their syllables: and I will trouble my young
readers with no more divisions of the order. And if their parents, tutors,
or governors, after this fair warning, choose to make them learn, instead,
the seventy-seven different names with which botanist-heraldries have
beautifully ennobled the family,--all I can say is, let them at least begin
by learning them themselves. They will be found in due order in pages 1084,
1085 of Loudon's Cyclopaedia