WHAT is the color of the dandelion ? There are many dandelions: that which I mean flowers in May, when the meadow grass has started and the hares are busy by daylight. That which flowers very early in the year has a thickness of hue, and is not interesting; in autumn the dandelions quite change their color and are pale. The right dandelion for this question is the one that comes about May with a very broad disk, and in such quantities as often to cover a whole meadow. I used to admire them very much in the fields by Surbiton (strong clay soil), and also on the towing-path of the Thames where the sward is very broad, opposite Long Ditton; indeed I have often walked up that towing-path on a beautiful sunny morning, when all was quiet except the nightingales in the Palace hedge, on purpose to admire them. I dare say they are all gone now forevermore; still, it is a pleasure to NEW SERIES.-VOL. XLVI., No. I

look back on anything beautiful. What color is this dandelion ? It is not yellow, nor orange, nor gold; put a sovereign on it and see the difference. They say the gypsies call it the Queen's great hairy dog-flower-a number of words to one stalk, and so, to get a color to it, you may call it the yellowgold-orange plant. In the winter on the black mud under a dark, dripping tree, I found a piece of orange peel, lately dropped-a bright red orange speck in the middle of the blackness. It looked very beautiful, and instantly recalled to my mind the great dandelion disks in the sunshine of summer. Yet certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps if ten people answered this question they would each give different answers. Again, a bright day or a cloudy, the presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of other colors, alters it very much; for the dandelion is not a glazed

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color, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is like a sponge, and adds to its own hue that which is passing, sucking it up. The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they blue? Ought they not to be dark? Is it really blue, or an illusion? And what is their color when you see the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a leaning pillar? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew have a different brown to those that are dry, and the upper surface of the green growing leaf is different to the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet one in October, has so toned down his spring yellow that you might fancy him a pale green leaf floating along the road. There is a shining, quivering, gleaming; there is a changing, fluttering, shifting; there is a mixing, weaving-varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with dots and veins, all playing over the purple heath; a very tangle of manytoned lights and hues. Then come the apples: if you look upon them from an upper window, so as to glance along the level plane of the fruit, delicate streaks of scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the eastern horizon before sunrise; golden tints under bronze, and apple green, and some that the wasps have hollowed, more glowingly beautiful than the rest; sober leaves and black and white swallows: to see it you must be high up, as if the apples were strewn on a sward of foliage. So have I gone in three steps from May dandelion to September apple; an immense space measured by things beautiful, so filled that ten folio volumes could not hold the description of them, and I have left out the meadows, the brooks, and hills. Often in writing about these things I have felt very earnestly my own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and many-sided colors. My gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would not give a note to one in a thousand of those I saw. At last I said, I will have more words; I will have more terms; I will have a book on color, and I will find and use the right technical name for each one of these lovely tints. I was told that the very best book was by Chevreul, which had tinted illustrations, chromatic scales, and all that could be desired.

Quite true, all of it; but for me it

contained nothing. There was a good deal about assorted wools, but nothing about leaves; nothing by which I could tell you the difference between the light scarlet of one poppy and the deep purple-scarlet of another species. The dandelion remained unexplained; as for the innumerable other flowers, and wings, and sky-colors, they were not even approached. The book, in short, dealt with the artificial and not with nature. Next I went to science-works on optics, such a mass of them. Some I had read in old time, and turned to again; some I read for the first time, some translated from the German, and so on. It appeared that, experimenting with physical color, tangible paint, they had found out that red, yellow, and blue were the three primary colors; and then, experimenting with light itself, with colors not tangible, they found out that red, green, and violet were the three primary colors; but neither of these would do for the dandelion. Once upon a time I had taken an interest in spectrum analysis, and the theory of the polarization of light was fairly familiar; any number of books, but not what I wanted to know. Next the idea occurred to me of buying all the colors used in painting, and tinting as many pieces of paper a separate hue, and so comparing these with petals and wings, and grass, and trifolium. This did not answer at all; my unskilful hands made a very poor wash, and the yellow paper set by a yellow petal did not agree, the scientific reason of which I cannot enter into now. Secondly, the names attached to many of these paints are unfamiliar to general readers; it is doubtful if bistre, Leitch's blue, oxide of chromium, and so on would convey an idea. They might as well be Greek symbols: no use to attempt to describe hues of heath or hill in that way. These, too, are only distinct colors. What was to be done with all the shades and tones? Still there remained the language of the studio; without doubt a master of painting could be found who would quickly supply the technical term of anything I liked to show him; but again no use, because it would be technical. still more insurmountable difficulty occurs in so far as I have looked at pictures, it seems as if the artists had met

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with the same obstacle in paints as I have in words-that is to say, a deficiency. Either painting is incompetent to express the extreme beauty of nature, or in some way the canons of art forbid the attempt. Therefore, I had to turn back, throw down my books with a bang, and get me to a bit of fallen timber in the open air to meditate..

Would it be possible to build up a fresh system of color language by means of natural objects? Could we say pinewood green, larch green, spruce green, wasp yellow, humble-bee orange; and there are fungi that have marked tints, but the Latin names of these agarics are not pleasant. Butterfly blue-but there are several varieties; and this plan is interfered with by two things: first, that almost every single item of nature, however minute, has got a distinctly different color, so that the dictionary of tints would be immense; and next, so very few would know the object itself that the color attached to it would have no meaning. The power of language has been gradually enlarging for a great length of time, and I venture to say that the English language at the present time can express more, and is more subtle, flexible, and, at the same time, vigorous, than any of which we possess a record. When people talk to me about studying Sanscrit, or Greek, or Latin, or German, or, still more absurd, French, I feel as if I could fell them with a mallet happily. Study the English, and you will find everything there, I reply. With such a language I fully anticipate, in years to come, a great development in the power of expressing thoughts and feelings which are now thoughts and feelings only. How many have said of the sea, It makes me feel something I cannot say"? Hence it is clear there exists in the intellect a layer, if I may so call it, of thought yet dumb -chambers within the mind which require the key of new words to unlock. Whenever that is done a fresh impetus is given to human progress. There are a million books, and yet with all their aid I cannot tell you the color of the May dandelion. There are three greens at this moment in my mind: that of the leaf of the flower-de-luce, that of the yellow iris-leaf, and that of the bayonetlike leaf of the common flag. With ad

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mission to a million books, how am I to tell you the difference between these tints? So many, many books and such a very, very little bit of nature in them! Though we have been so many thousand years upon the earth we do not seem to have done any more as yet than walk along beaten foot-paths, and sometimes really it would seem as if there was something in the minds of many men quite artificial, quite distinct from the sun, and trees, and hills-altogether house people, whose gods must be set in four-cornered buildings. There is nothing in books that touches my dandelion.

It grows, ah yes, it grows! How does it grow? Builds itself up somehow of sugar and starch, and turns mud into bright color and dead earth into food for bees, and some day perhaps for you, and knows when to shut its petals and how to construct the brown seeds to float with the wind, and how to please the children, and how to puzzle me. Ingenious dandelion! If you find out that its correct botanical name is Leontodon taraxacum, or Leontodon dens-leonis; that will bring it into botany; and there is a place called Dandelion Castle in Kent, and a bell with the inscription:

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John de Dandelion with his great dog, Brought over this bell on a mill cog,' which is about as relevant as the mere words Leontodon taraxacum. Botany is the knowledge of plants according to the accepted definition; naturally, therefore, when I began to think I would like to know a little more of flowers than could be learned by seeing them in the fields, I went to botany. Nothing could be more simple. You buy a book which first of all tells you how to recognize them, how to classify them; next instructs you in their uses, medical or economical; next tells you about the folk-lore and curious associations; next enters into a lucid explanation of the physiology of the plant and its relation to other creatures; and finally, and most important, supplies you with the ethical feeling, the ideal aspiration to be identified with each particular flower. One moderately thick volume would probably suffice for such a modest round as this.

Lo! now the labor of Hercules when he set about bringing up Cerberus from

below, and all the work done by Apollo in the years when he ground corn, are but a little matter compared with the attempt to master botany. Great minds have been at it these two thousand years, and yet we are still only nibbling at the edge of the leaf, as the ploughboys bite the young hawthorn in spring. The mere classification-all plant-lore was a vast chaos till there came the man of Sweden, the great Linnæus, till the sexes were recognized, and everything was ruled out and set in place again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnæus who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of window-perhaps the first man who had ever done so for seventeen hundred years or so, since superstition blighted the progress of pagan Rome. The work he did! But no one reads Linnæus now; the folios, indeed, might moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got into the minds of men, and the text is of little consequence. The best book he wrote to read now is the delightful Tour in Lapland, with its quaint pen-and-ink sketches, so realistically vivid, as if the thing sketched had been banged on the paper and so left its impress. I have read it three times, and I still cherish the old yellow pages; it is the best botanical book, written by the greatest of botanists, specially sent on a botanical expedition, and it contains nothing about botany. It tells you about the canoes, and the hard cheese, and the Laplander's warehouse on top of a pole, like a pigeon-house; and the innocent way in which the maiden helped the traveller in his bath, and how the aged men ran so fast that the devil could not catch them; and, best of all, because it gives a smack in the face to modern pseudo-scientific medical cant about hygiene, showing how the Laplanders break every law," human and "Divine," ventilation, bath, and diet-all the trash-and therefore enjoy the most excellent health, and live to a great old age. Still I have not succeeded in describing the immense labor there was in

learning to distinguish plants on the Linnæan system. Then comes in order of time the natural system, the geographical distribution; then there is the geological relationship, so to say, to Pliocene plants, natural selection and evolution. Of that let us say nothing; let sleeping dogs lie, and evolution is a very weary dog. Most charming, however, will be found the later studies of naturalists on the interdependence of flowers and insects; there is another work the dandelion has got to do-endless, endless botany! Where did the plants come from at first? Did they come creeping up out of the sea at the edge of the estuaries, and gradually run their roots into the ground, and so make green the earth? Did Man come out of the sea, as the Greeks thought? There are so many ideas in plants. Flora, with a full lap, scattering knowledge and flowers together; every thing good and sweet seems to come out of flowers, up to the very highest thoughts of the soul, and we carry them daily to the very threshold of the other world. Next you may try the microscope and its literature, and find the crystals in the rhubarb.

I remember taking sly glances when I was a very little boy at an old Culpepper's Herbal, heavily bound in leather and curiously illustrated. It was so deliciously wicked to read about the poisons; and I thought perhaps it was a book like that only in papyrus rolls, that was used by the sorceress who got ready the poisoned mushrooms in old Rome. Youth's ideas are so imaginative, and bring together things that are so widely separated. Conscience told me I had no business to read about poisons; but there was a fearful fascination in hemlock, and I recollect tasting a little bit it was very nasty. day, nevertheless, if any one wishes to begin a pleasant, interesting, unscientific acquaintance with English plants he would do very well indeed to get a good copy of Culpepper. Gray hairs had insisted in showing themselves in my beard when, all those weary years afterward, I thought I would like to buy the still older Englishman, Gerard, who had no Linnæus to guide him, who walked about our English lanes centuries ago. What wonderful scenes he must

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