| THE COLORS OF FLOWERS. |
By HENRI COUPIN.
MUCH might be said, from an artistic and poetic point of view, concerning the colors of flowers. It is in the corolla that they reveal themselves in their most minute delicacy. The tints so widely diffused among animals, even those of butterflies, are coarse as compared with them, and the painter's palette is powerless to reproduce them. They run through the whole gamut of the solar spectrum, even to its most minute details. Some naturalists have striven to establish a classification of them, and it will be convenient to be acquainted with their efforts, though they are not decisive and are somewhat artificial, like all classifications. We give one of the most ingenious of them:
| Green. | |||||
| Cyanic series. | Greenish-blue. | Yellow-green | Xanthic series. | ||
| Blue. | Yellow. | ||||
| Blue-violet. | Yellow-orange. | ||||
| Violet. | Orange. | ||||
| Violet-red. | Orange-red. | ||||
| Red. | |||||
The type of the cyanic series is blue, and that of the xanthic series yellow. The first is sometimes denominated the deoxidized series, and the second the oxidized, but these designations have hardly solid enough foundations to be preserved. De Candolle, who publishes the table in his Vegetable Physiology, appends some interesting remarks to it.
It will be noticed by the inspection of the table that nearly all the flowers susceptible of changes of color, as a rule, simply go up or down the scale of shades of the series to which they belong. Thus, in the xanthic series the flowers of the Nyctago jalapa may be yellow, yellow-orange, or red; those of Rosa eglantina yellow-orange or orange-red; those of nasturtium from yellow to orange; the flowers of Ranunculus asiaticus present all the colors of red up to green; those of the Hieracium staticefolium, and of some other yellow Chicoraceæ and of some Leguminosæ like the lotus, become greenish-yellow when dried, etc. In the cyanic series the flowers of many Boraginaceæ, especially of Lithospermum purpureo-œeruleum, vary from blue to violet-red; those of hortensia from rose to blue; the ligulate flowers of the asters from blue to red or violet; those of the hyacinths from blue to red, etc.
There are, however, a few apparent exceptions to this rule. Thus, although the hyacinths usually vary only in the blues, reds,
