were a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground, and with a new and distinct fructification.  But the rushes differ wholly from the sedge and grass in their blossom structure.  It is not a dual cluster, but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the grasses, and so closely connected with a higher order of plants, that I think you will find it convenient to group the rushes at once with that higher order, to which, if you will for the present let me give the general name of Drosidae, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of them much more shortly and clearly.

80.  These Drosidae, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture—­ or at certain seasons—­into dry ground.  They are not among water-plants, but the signs of water resting among dry places.  Many of the true water-plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding them; in the Drosidae the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, and the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the light by force through the unwilling green.  They are often required to retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long times of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which some become a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.

81.  So, now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the herbs of the field into three great groups,—­Drosidae, Carices,* Gramineae,—­ dew-plants, sedges, and grasses.  Then the Drosidae are divided into five great orders:  lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes.  No tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an influence on man as this great group of Drosidae, depending, not so much on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their petals; enabling them to take forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as the crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or, when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which forms the labiate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus.  Put by their side their Nereid sisters, the water-lilies, and you have them in the origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the most powerful floral myths yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile, Arno, and Avon.

* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger sub-species.