10.  The truth of all popular traditions as to the healing power of herbs will be tried impartially as soon as men again desire to lead healthy lives; but I shall not in ‘Proserpina’ retain any of the names of their gathered and dead or distilled substance, but name them always from the characters of their life.  I retain, however, for this plant its name Brunella, Fr. Brunelle, because we may ourselves understand it as a derivation from Brune; and I bring it here before the reader’s attention as giving him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of degradation which takes place in the forms of flowers under more or less malefic influence, causing distortion and disguise of their floral structure.  Thus it is not the normal character of a flower petal to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish’s jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal’s throat.  A really uncorrupted flower suggests none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself.

11.  I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, with exactitude which has rendered the definition authoritative for all time, the tribe to which this Brownie flower belongs, constituting them his fourth class, and describing them in terms even more depreciatingly imaginative than any I have ventured to use myself.  I translate the passage (vol. i., p. 177):—­

12.  “The name of Labiate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which, beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which is either single or double.  It is proper to a labiate flower,—­first, that it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat unifolium), for the most part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper hood (cucullum papyraceum); and, secondly, that its pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four seeds, which ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their own seed-vessel, by which a labiate flower is distinguished from a personate one, whose pistil becomes a capsule far divided from the calyx (a calyce longo divisam).  And a labiate flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which have four seeds, in that the lips of a labiate flower have a gape like the face of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emulous of animal form.”

13.  This class is then divided into four sections.

In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked—­“galeatum est, vel falcatum.”  In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon—­“cochlearis instar est excavatum.”  In the third the upper lip is erect.  And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all.

The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once rejecting a classification of lipped plants into three classes that have lips, and one that has none, and in which the lips of those that have got any, are like helmets and spoons.