[Sctl-devel] Goldfinch we have with us always. Easily recognized as he is, there are many well-educated

[Goeller <ly...@kl...>]

Ame any plant in the world from seeing only a single leaf! But her
college was not Harvard, and Professor Gray has probably never so much
as heard of such an admirable method. On the whole, it is good to have
the curiosity piqued with here and there a vegetable stranger,--its name
and even its family relationship a mystery. The leaf is nothing
extraordinary, perhaps, yet who knows but that the bloom may be of the
rarest beauty? Or the leaf is of a gracious shape and texture, but how
shall we tell whether the flower will correspond with it? No; we must do
with them as with chance acquaintances of our own kind. The man looks
every inch a gentleman; his face alone seems a sufficient guaranty of
good-breeding and intelligence; but none the less,--and not forgetting
that charity thinketh no evil,--we shall do well to wait till we have
heard him talk and seen how he will behave, before we put a final label
upon him. Wait for the blossom and the fruit (the blossom _is_ the fruit
in its first stage); for the old rule is still the true one,--alike in
botany and in morals,--"By their fruits ye shall know them." What a
world within a world the forest is! Under the trees were the
shrubs,--knee-high rock-maples making the ground verdant for acres
together, or dwarf thickets of yew, now bearing green acorn-like
berries; while below these was a variegated carpet, oxalis and the
flower of Linnaeus, ferns and club-mosses (the glossy _Lycopodium
lucidulum_ was especially plentiful), to say nothing of the true mosses
and the lichens. Of all these things I should have seen more, no doubt,
had not my head been so much of the time in the tree-tops. For yonder
were the birds; and how could I be expected to notice what lay at my
feet, while I was watching intently