Of all these likenesses the most perilous is that between the malodorous ramsons, which have a very abiding smell of garlic, and the highly esteemed lily of the valley. Hence a story which I once heard from the affable keeper who presides over a wooded hill in Westmorland where the lily of the valley abounds, and where visitors are permitted to pick as many flowers as they like after payment of a shilling. Seeing a gentleman busily engaged in gathering a large bunch of ramsons, the keeper, suspecting error, asked him what he supposed himself to be picking. "Why, lilies of the valley, of course," was the reply. When the truth was explained, the visitor thanked the keeper cordially, and added: "I was picking the flowers for my wife: but if I had brought her a present of garlic she would have had something to say to me. I myself have lost the sense of smell."[6]
[Footnote 6: So, too, had the poet Wordsworth; of whom William Morris, who disliked the Wordsworthian cult, used to say, in explanation of such antipathy: "The fellow couldn't smell."]
Likeness or unlikeness--it is all a matter of observation. To a stranger, every sheep in the flock has a face like that of her fellows: to the shepherd there are no two sheep alike.
What is it? a learned man Could give it a clumsy name. Let him name it who can, The beauty would be the same.
AMONG the difficulties that waylay the beginner must be reckoned the botanical phraseology. We have heard of "the language of flowers," and of its romantic associations; but the language of botany is another matter, and though less picturesque is equally cryptic and not to be mastered without study.
When, for example, we read of a certain umbelliferous plant that its "cremocarp consists of two semicircular-ovoid mericarps, constricted at the commissure"--or when, with our lives in our hands, so to speak, we experiment in fungus-eating, and learn that a particular mushroom has its stem "fistulose, subsquamulose, its pileus membranaceous, rarely subcarnose, when young ovato-conic, then campanulate, at length torn and revolute, deliquescent, and clothed with the flocculose fragments of the veil"--we probably feel that some further information would be welcome.