10.  I will not attempt at present to arrange the varieties of the Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and presumably characteristic forms belong to the Cape; and only since Mr. Froude came back from his African explorings have I been able to get any clear idea of the brilliancy and associated infinitude of the Cape flowers.  If I could but write down the substance of what he has told me, in the course of a chat or two, which have been among the best privileges of my recent stay in London, (prolonged as it has been by recurrence of illness,) it would be a better summary of what should be generally known in the natural history of southern plants than I could glean from fifty volumes of horticultural botany.  In the meantime, everything being again thrown out of gear by the aforesaid illness, I must let this piece of ‘Proserpina’ break off, as most of my work does—­and as perhaps all of it may soon do—­leaving only suggestion for the happier research of the students who trust me thus far.

11.  Some essential points respecting the flower I shall note, however, before ending.  There is one large and frequent species of it of which the flowers are delicately yellow, touched with tawny red, forming one of the chief elements of wild foreground vegetation in the healthy districts of hard Alpine limestone.[26] This is, I believe, the only European type of the large Cape varieties, in all of which, judging from such plates as have been accessible to me, the crests or fringes of the lower petal are less conspicuous than in the smaller species; and the flower almost takes the aspect of a broom-blossom or pease-blossom.  In the smaller European varieties, the white fringes of the lower petal are the most important and characteristic part of the flower, and they are, among European wild flowers, absolutely without any likeness of associated structure.  The fringes or crests which, towards the origin of petals, so often give a frosted or gemmed appearance to the centres of flowers, are here thrown to the extremity of the petal, and suggest an almost coralline structure of blossom, which in no other instance whatever has been imitated, still less carried out into its conceivable varieties of form.  How many such varieties might have been produced if these fringes of the Giulietta, or those already alluded to of Lucia nivea, had been repeated and enlarged; as the type, once adopted for complex bloom in the thistle-head, is multiplied in the innumerable gradations of thistle, teasel, hawkweed, and aster!  We might have had flowers edged with lace finer than was ever woven by mortal fingers, or tasselled and braided with fretwork of silver, never tarnished—­or hoarfrost that grew brighter in the sun.  But it was not to be, and after a few hints of what might be done in this kind, the Fate, or Folly, or, on recent theories, the extreme fitness—­and consequent survival, of the Thistles and Dandelions, entirely drives the fringed Lucias and blue-flushing milkworts out of common human neighbourhood, to live recluse lives with the memories of the abbots of Cluny, and pastors of Piedmont.