40.  VIII.  VIOLA PALUSTRIS.  Marsh Violet.  Flora Danica, 83.  As there drawn, the most finished and delicate in form of all the violet tribe; warm white, streaked with red; and as pure in outline as an oxalis, both in flower and leaf:  it is like a violet imitating oxalis and anagallis.

In the Flora Suecica, the petal-markings are said to be black; in ’Viola lactea’ a connected species, (Sowerby, 45,) purple.  Sowerby’s plate of it under the name ‘palustris’ is pale purple veined with darker; and the spur is said to be ‘honey-bearing,’ which is the first mention I find of honey in the violet.  The habitat given, sandy and turfy heaths.  It is said to grow plentifully near Croydon.

Probably, therefore, a violet belonging to the chalk, on which nearly all herbs that grow wild—­from the grass to the bluebell—­are singularly sweet and pure.  I hope some of my botanical scholars will take up this question of the effect of different rocks on vegetation, not so much in bearing different species of plants, as different characters of each species.[7]

41.  IX.  VIOLA SECLUSA.  Monk’s Violet.  “Hirta,” Flora Danica, 618, “In fruticetis raro.”  A true wood violet, full but dim in purple.  Sowerby, 894, makes it paler.  The leaves very pure and severe in the Danish one;—­longer in the English.  “Clothed on both sides with short, dense, hoary hairs.”

Also belongs to chalk or limestone only (Sowerby).

X. VIOLA CANINA.  Dog Violet.  I have taken it for analysis in my two plates, because its grace of form is too much despised, and we owe much more of the beauty of spring to it, in English mountain ground, than to the Regina.

XI.  VIOLA CORNUTA.  Cow Violet.  Enough described already.

XII.  VIOLA RUPESTRIS.  Crag Violet.  On the high limestone moors of Yorkshire, perhaps only an English form of Viola Aurea, but so much larger, and so different in habit—­growing on dry breezy downs, instead of in dripping caves—­that I allow it, for the present, separate name and number.[8]

42.  ‘For the present,’ I say all this work in ‘Proserpina’ being merely tentative, much to be modified by future students, and therefore quite different from that of ‘Deucalion,’ which is authoritative as far as it reaches, and will stand out like a quartz dyke, as the sandy speculations of modern gossiping geologists get washed away.

But in the meantime, I must again solemnly warn my girl-readers against all study of floral genesis and digestion.  How far flowers invite, or require, flies to interfere in their family affairs—­which of them are carnivorous—­and what forms of pestilence or infection are most favourable to some vegetable and animal growths,—­let them leave the people to settle who like, as Toinette says of the Doctor in the ’Malade Imaginaire’—­“y mettre le nez.”  I observe a paper in the last ‘Contemporary Review,’ announcing for a discovery patent to all mankind that the colours of flowers were made “to attract insects"![9] They will next hear that the rose was made for the canker, and the body of man for the worm.