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An Indian paint-brush with a flower in an oblong cream-colored spike, with purple blotches, was named Castilleia inconspicua, possibly because it is so much less conspicuous and alluring to the eye than its well-known and striking brother of the California fields, C. parviflora. This species has been of great interest to botanists, as when first observed it was placed in the genus Orthocarpus.
In these days the most eminent botanists are not ashamed to compare notes with the insects, since it turns out that these bits of animate wisdom long ago anticipated some of the latest improvements of our modern systematists.
Some variations useful to him have probably arisen suddenly, or by one step; many botanists, for instance, believe that the fuller's teazle, with its hooks, which cannot be rivalled by any mechanical contrivance, is only a variety of the wild Dipsacus; and this amount of change may have suddenly arisen in a seedling.
Could the former but discover the exact therapeutic and venomous virtues of some of those plants, many of which are quite unknown to botanists, what innumerable new and potent remedies might be found to enrich the pharmacopoeia of civilized people! Agriculture, in all its varied branches, could here find incalculable treasures of fertility!
The reason why I entertain this belief is, that in all cases where similar guesses have been hazarded whether with regard to plants, or birds, or mammalia they have eventually proved far below the mark; and as the palm countries are the very regions of the earth least known and least explored by botanists, it is but reasonable to conclude that great numbers of species have never yet been described, nor even seen.
Azaleas, laurels, and tiny clumps of bamboos, are the most common plants to be seen in these charming little spots of greenery. Botanists declare Japan to be one of the richest of all countries in its vegetation. The cultivation of the soil is thoroughly and skilfully systematized, the greatest possible results being obtained from a given area of land.
It may readily be imagined that his great work precipitated an intense and prolonged controversy, and incited emulous investigation by the botanists of his time.
Families in the vegetable kingdom had long been distinguished by French botanists; and one cannot examine the groups they call by this name, without perceiving, that, though they bring them together and describe them according to other characters, they have been unconsciously led to unite them from the general similarity of their port and bearing.
Not merely the plucking and drying of the herbs in sunny, quiet botanical gardens, and the sorting and mingling of earths and metals among the furnaces of the laboratory; not merely the first tremendous tragic fight between the sudden sickness and the physician, and the first pathetic, hard-won victory, the first weary but rapturous return out of doors of the convalescent; but the life of the men on whose science our power for life against death is based: the botanists knee-deep in the pale spring woods; the geologists in the snowy hollows of the great blue mountain; the men themselves, the youths listening and the elder men teaching, grave and eager intellectual faces, in the lecture rooms.
However bare and simple this definition of species may appear to be, we confidently appeal to all practical naturalists, whether zoologists, botanists, or palæontologists, to say if, in the vast majority of cases, they know, or mean to affirm, anything more of the group of animals or plants they so denominate than what has just been stated.
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