ittle awed at it, as I should
be by a green snake--only the snake would be prettier.) The flowers also, I
perceive, have not their two horns regularly set _in_, but the five spiky
calyx-ends stick out between the petals--sometimes three, sometimes four,
it may be all five up and down--and produce variously fanged or forked
effects, feebly ophidian or diabolic. On the whole, a plant entirely
mismanaging itself,--reprehensible and awkward, with taints of worse than
awkwardness; and clearly, no true 'species,' but only a link.[2] And it
really is, as you will find presently, a link in two directions; it is half
violet, half pansy, a 'cur' among the Dogs, and a thoughtless thing among
the thoughtful. And being so, it is also a link between the entire violet
tribe and the Runners--pease, strawberries, and the like, whose glory is in
their speed; but a violet has no business whatever to run anywhere, being
appointed to stay where it was born, in extremely contented (if not
secluded) places. "Half-hidden from the eye?"--no; but desiring attention,
or extension, or corpulence, or connection with anybody else's family,
still less.

[Illustration: FIG. II.]

26. And if, at the time you read this, you can run out and gather a _true_
violet, and its leaf, you will find that the flower grows from the very
ground, out of a cluster of heart-shaped leaves, becoming here a little
rounder, there a little sharper, but on the whole heart-shaped, and that is
the proper and essential form of the violet leaf. You will find also that
the flower has five petals; and being held down by the bent stalk, two of
them bend back and up, as if resisting it; two expand at the sides; and
one, the principal, grows downwards, with its attached spur behind. So that
the front view of the flower must be _some_ modification of this typical
arrangement, Fig. M, (for middle form). Now the statement above quoted from
Figuier, Sec. 16, means, if he had been able to express himself, that the two
lateral petals in the violet are directed downwards, Fig. II. A, and in the
pansy upwards, Fig. II. C. And that, in the main, is true, and to be fixed
well and clearly in your mind. But in the real orders, one flower passes
into the other through all kinds of intermediate positions of petal, and
the plurality of species are of the middle type. Fig. II. B.[3]

27. Next, if you will gather a real pansy _leaf_, you will find it--not
heart-shape in the least, but sharp oval or