Indeed, many of the flowers in request nowadays for ceremonial uses in our own and other countries may be traced back to this period; the symbolical meaning attached to certain plants having survived 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 authority, a wreath of its leaves having been worn by magistrates.  On certain occasions the mitre of the Jewish high priest was adorned with a chaplet of the blossoms of the henbane.  Of the further use of garlands, we are told that the Japanese employ them very freely;[4] both men and women wearing chaplets of fragrant blossoms.  A wreath