1860, in June.

[4] Admirably engraved by Mr. Burgess, from my pen drawing, now at Oxford.
By comparing it with the plate of the same flower in Sowerby's work, the
student will at once see the difference between attentive drawing, which
gives the cadence and relation of masses in a group, and the mere copying
of each flower in an unconsidered huddle.

[5] "Histoire des Plantes." Ed. 1865, p. 416.

[6] The like of it I have now painted, Number 281, CASE XII., in the
Educational Series of Oxford.

[7] Properly, Florae Danicae, but it is so tiresome to print the diphthongs
that I shall always call it thus. It is a folio series, exquisitely begun,
a hundred years ago; and not yet finished.

[8] Magnified about seven times. See note at end of this chapter.

[9] American,--'System of Botany,' the best technical book I have.

[10] 'Dicranum cerviculatum,' sequel to Flora Danica, Tab. MMCCX.

[11] The reader should buy a small specimen of this mineral; it is a useful
type of many structures.

[12] LUCCA, _Aug. 9th, 1874._--I have left this passage as originally
written, but I believe the dome is of accumulated earth. Bringing home,
here, evening after evening, heaps of all kinds of mosses from the hills
among which the Archbishop Ruggieri was hunting the wolf and her whelps in
Ugolino's dream, I am more and more struck, every day, with their special
function as earth-gatherers, and with the enormous importance to their own
brightness, and to our service, of that dark and degraded state of the
inferior leaves. And it fastens itself in my mind mainly as their
distinctive character, that as the leaves of a tree become wood, so the
leaves of a moss become earth, while yet a normal part of the plant. Here
is a cake in my hand weighing half a pound, bright green on the surface,
with minute crisp leaves; but an inch thick beneath in what looks at first
like clay, but is indeed knitted fibre of exhausted moss. Also, I don't at
all find the generalization I made from the botanical books likely to have
occurred to me from the real things. No moss leaves that I can find here
give me the idea of resemblance to pineapple leaves; nor do I see any,
through my weak lens, clearly serrated; but I do find a general tendency to
run into a silky filamentous structure, and in some, especially on a small
one gathered from the fissures in the marble of the cathedral, white
threads of considerable length at the extremities of the leaves, of wh