The Language of Flowers [By L. Cortambert. Transl.] (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1835 edition. Excerpt: ... sometimes varying to a whitish, or inclining to a bluish cast, with three or four darker streaks running from the base. The flower, stalk, leaf, and root, of this plant are all beneficial to man. With its different juices are composed syrups and ointments, equally agreeable to the taste and conducive to health. The way-lost traveller has occasionally found in its root a wholesome and substantial food. We need but look down to our feet to discover, throughout all Nature, proofs of her love and provident care; but this affectionate mother has often concealed, in plants as well as in human beings, the greatest virtues under the simplest appearance. It is, nevertheless, fortunate for the husbandman that Nature should have assigned to the Mallow a place on the banks and borders of fields, and not scattered it over the meadows, where its spreading branches would have injured the turf, and where, as cattle in general refuse to eat this plant, it would have soon overrun and smothered other vegetation. flos adonis. painful recollections. Adonis was killed, while hunting, by a boar. Venus, who, for his sake, had relinquished the joys of Cythera, shed tears for the fate of her favourite. They were not lost; the earth received them, and immediately produced a light, delicate plant, covered with flowers resembling drops of blood. Bright and transient flowers, too faithful emblems of the pleasures of life, ye were consecrated by Beauty herself to painful recollections That this flower owes its name to the favourite of Venus is not to be disputed; but, whether the goddess of beauty changed her lover into this plant or the anemone it would be difficult to decide, since the Linnean system of dividing plants into families did not exist when the gods and...