6. Prunell, or Brunell—­Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnaeus, and idly following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its name—­of which presently.  Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in English—­meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.

7.  As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its hooded blossoms.  But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown.  And what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the scattered blossoms;—­of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain, and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of the cluster broken short away altogether.

8.  We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes.  But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind.  I take my lens, therefore—­to the little wonder of a brown wasps’ nest with blue-winged wasps in it,—­and perceive therewith the following particulars.

9.  First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe.

Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose of use or decoration—­any more than a hearth-brush put for a helmet-crest,—­and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw, edged with ghastly teeth,—­and yet more, that the hollow within begins to suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen glands.

I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by imagination.  Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant, Brunelle.