artificial flowers of which a very beautiful
group can be purchased for something like a
shilling: but there is an immense variety of
substances employed other than woven
materials.

In many of the specimens of artificial
flowers, especially those of French manufacture,
the truthfulness of imitation is very
remarkable. Not only are roses and lilies
and hot-house plants represented as in the
full bloom of their floral existence; but even
in their declining or decaying state, with the
leaves more or less withered, and the blight
and the canker-worm busily engaged at their
mischief. We are not quite sure that this
is to be commended. The object in view
is not simply to imitate Nature, but to
imitate her beauties. Blight and canker-
worm are no beauties, and these are
sometimes simulated with painful success. The
Dutch painters frequently made a similar
mistake; they imitated with marvellous
fidelity, and the things imitated were often
such as we would rather be without. Let us,
however, forget the blight and canker-worm,
and remember only the plants in their beauty.
These plants, be it observed, are not merely
flowers in full bloom, but plants in many
other stages of their botanical existence; and
they thus really become useful object-lessons.
Sometimes the same plant is exhibited in
three or four successive stages;—in bud, in
blossom, in full maturity, and in drooping
decay; sometimes there are orchideous
plants, and hop plants, and vine twigs, and
oats, rye, and wheat; sometimes the blue
and red autumnal parasitic flowers are
imitated; such as the ivy, and oak leaf
and the acorn. A beautiful exercise of skill is
that by which the various grasses are
imitated. In them the superior botanical
knowledge of the French artist is manifested; from
the "reedy sedge to the quaking grass," the
tufts of various kinds are faithfully imitated
in various stages of progress towards ripeness
or decay. There are occasionally produced
clusters of heath springs, the flowers of which,
though not so large as a barleycorn, are
supported each on an individual stem. A lady
was once looking at a beautiful group of
artificial grasses and mosses; she says—"A
rough but intelligent country lad, who stood
beside me for some minutes, after a gaze of
silent wonder, broke out with the best
compliment I had heard to the fidelity of these
imitations, by remarking, in his own vernacular,
that they only wanted a bird's nest to
be nature itself."

Artificial flower-making is not an
insignificant trade. An inquiry was made into
the industrial statistics of Paris in eighteen
hundred and forty-seven, which lets us into
a little secret in this matter. The total
manufacture of cambric flowers in that year was
prodigious, amounting in value to more than
four hundred thousand pounds sterling. We,
in England, only took twelve thousand
pounds' worth of this value; for we pride
ourselves on being able to make our own artificial
flowers. The cambric, muslin, gauze, velvet,
silk, and other materials were procured
from St. Etienne, St. Quentin, and Lyons; the
dyes and colours were prepared expressly for
the purpose by manufacturing chemists; the
buds, leaves, petals, stamens, pistils, and
other component parts, were made in small
workshops by persons who each attended to
only one part of a flower; while the whole
were fitted together in other workshops. Even
these workshops are frequently limited to one
single kind of flower each; so completely is
the division of labour carried out. There
were about fifty small manufacturers of
petals and stamens and other component
parts, employing about five hundred persons;
while there were nearly six hundred dealers
or vendors, who employed nearly six thousand
persons in building up the various integers
into whole groups of flowers. Of this
immense number of persons, about five thousand
were women, whose average earnings were
estimated at about twenty-pence per day.
Several of the manufacturers effect sales to
the amount of ten thousand pounds a year
each. We must therefore regard French
flower manufacturers as commercial men of
notable import.

Some of the French flowers are so
extraordinary that they court criticism aided by
magnifying-glasses; and sometimes even
then it remains doubtful what materials
have been used. The French go to work in
the right spirit in these matters; for their
best flower-makers are practical botanists,
who pass through regular courses of study,
until they become familiar with every minute
peculiarity in the structure of a flower. The
manufacturers, too, will not be content with
a mere close imitation of nature; they require
a delicate taste to be possessed by the
monteurs who form the flowers into bouquets,
head-wreaths, and dress-trimmings. The very
same flowers made up into the very same
kind of group, will sell for double the money
when made by a popular monteur which they
will command if made up by one of less
note. This is elevating artificial flower-
making to something approaching to a fine
art. Besides the posey or the nosegay, there
are the wreaths of orange blossom, and the
sea-weed garlands, and the coral chaplets, and
the wreaths of little water-plants, and the
chaplets of corn-plants—all require an artistic
building up, after the bits of cambric and
sarsenet and wire have been made into flowers.

It is a dainty work to make a rose of these
simple materials. Petals, and leaves, and
calyx, and buds, and stem, and stalk—all have
to be imitated; and no little taste is
required in the selection of materials which
have the requisite texture of surface and
shade of colour. The busy fingers of the
workwoman, when about to make the petals
of the rose, cut out very fine cambric by