3.  What I have called ‘stars’ are irregular clusters of approximately, or tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, of very pale green,—­they may be six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement, essentially first trine, with two succeeding above.  Taken as a whole the plant is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the flower has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,—­spurred, and five-petaled,[11] and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted—­the calyx, of a dark soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur.  There are often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five.  Tearing away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell, seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage.  Pulling away now also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an irregular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly like the wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.[12]

4.  The calyx is of a dark soppy green, I said; like that of sugary preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it were, water-shrivelled, as one’s fingers shrivel if kept too long in water.  And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live there—­not for its own sins, but for some Emperor Pansy’s, far away in the garden,—­in a partly boggish, partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;—­something of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable sensuality, even in its desolation.  Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be truer of it than a piggish, the nest of it being indeed on the rock, or morassy rock-investiture, like a sea-bird’s on her rock ledge.

5.  I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon’s Encyclopaedia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley (’Ladies’ Botany’), and Figuer, without being able to find the meaning of ‘Lentibulariaceae,’ to which tribe the Pinguicula is said by them all (except Figuier) to belong.  It may perhaps be in Sowerby:[13] but these above-named treatises are precisely of the kind with which the ordinary scholar must be content:  and in all of them he has to learn this long, worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed into classing together two orders naturally quite distinct, the Butterworts and the Bladderworts.