after the
lapse of many centuries. For a careful description of the flowers thus
employed, we would refer the reader to two interesting papers
contributed by Miss Lambert to the _Nineteenth Century_,[2] in which she
has collected together in a concise form all the principal items of
information on the subject in past years. A casual perusal of these
papers will suffice to show what a wonderful knowledge of botany the
ancients must have possessed; and it may be doubted whether the most
costly array of plants witnessed at any church festival supersedes a
similar display witnessed by worshippers in the early heathen temples.
In the same way, we gain an insight into the profusion of flowers
employed by heathen communities in later centuries, showing how
intimately associated these have been with their various forms of
worship. Thus, the Singhalese seem to have used flowers to an almost
incredible extent, and one of their old chronicles tells us how the
Ruanwelle dagoba--270 feet high--was festooned with garlands from
pedestal to pinnacle, till it had the appearance of one uniform bouquet.
We are further told that in the fifteenth century a certain king offered
no less than 6,480,320 sweet-smelling flowers at the shrine of the
tooth; and, among the regulations of the temple at Dambedenia in the
thirteenth century, one prescribes that "every day an offering of
100,000 blossoms, and each day a different kind of flower," should be
presented. This is a striking instance, but only one of many.

"With regard to Greece, there are few of our trees and flowers," writes
Mr. Moncure Conway,[3] "which were not cultivated in the gorgeous
gardens of Epicurus, Pericles, and Pisistratus." Among the flowers
chiefly used for garlands and chaplets in ceremonial rites we find the
rose, violet, anemone, thyme, melilot, hyacinth, crocus, yellow lily,
and yellow flowers generally. Thucydides relates how, in the ninth year
of the Peloponnesian War, the temple of Juno at Argos was burnt down
owing to the priestess Chrysis having set a lighted torch too near the
garlands and then fallen asleep. The garlands caught fire, and the
damage was irremediable before she was conscious of the mischief. The
gigantic scale on which these floral ceremonies were conducted may be
gathered from the fact that in the procession of Europa at Corinth a
huge crown of myrtle, thirty feet in circumference, was borne. At Athens
the myrtle was regarded as the symbol of autho