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AGRICULTURE
NEW York STATE
COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE,

ARTMENT OF HORTICUI TURE
CORNELL UNIVERS;

Cornell University Libra

“i

Cornell University

Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu381924002070856

NEW YORK STATE
SOLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
DEPARTMENT OF FLORIGULTURE
AND
GRNAMENTAL WORTIGULTURE
GORNELL UNIVERSITY ©
ITHACA, N. Y.

FLOWERS

AND THEIR PEDIGREES

FLOWERS

AND THEIR PEDI@REES

BY

GRANT ALLEN

AUTHOR OF
“COLIN CIOUT’S CALENDAR’ ‘VIGNETTES FROM NATURE’
ETC.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
t, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET.
1884. a

PREFACE.

a

THESE little essays originally appeared as articles
in ‘ Longman’s Magazine,’ the ‘ Cornhill Magazine,’
‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’
and ‘ Belgravia,’ and I have to thank the editors and
proprietors of those periodicals for kind permission
to reprint them here. They are now offered to the-
public as a first instalment of a work which I hope
some day more fully to carry out—a Functional
Companion to the British Flora. We know by this
time pretty well what our English wild flowers are
like : we want to know next why they are just what
they are, and how they came to be so.
G. A.
Lyme, Dorset :
July 1883.

CONTENTS.

eas
PAGE

INTRODUCTORY. ‘ ‘ : 3 a ‘ I

I, THE DAISY’S PEDIGREE . i : 5 ‘ 6
Il, THE ROMANCE OF A WAYSIDE WEED. ‘ » 44
III. STRAWBERRIES . F ‘ ‘ ; ; . 80
IV. CLEAVERS . e ‘ . : ; , . 100
V. THE ORIGIN OF WHEAT . 4 : : . 133
VI. A MOUNTAIN TULIP . ‘ ‘ ; ; . 173
VII. A FAMILY HISTORY . ’ : ‘ : . 197

VIII. CUCKOO-PINT . 7 : ‘ F ‘ . 236

FLOWERS AND THEIR PEDIGREES.

INTRODUCTORY.

Our beautiful green England is carpeted, more than
any other country in the world, perhaps, save only
Switzerland and a few other mountain lands, with a
perpetual sward of vivid verdure, interspersed with
innumerable colours of daisies, and buttercups, and
’ meadow-sweet, and harebells, and broader patches of
purple heather. It is usual to speak of tropical vege-
tation, indeed, with a certain forced ecstasy of language ;
but those who know the tropics best, know that, though
you may find a few exceptionally large and brilliant
blossoms here and there under the breadth and. shade
of equatorial forests, the prevailing tone is one of mono-
tonous dry greenery ; and there is nothing anywhere
in very southern climes to compare, as to mass of
colour, with our Scotch hillsides, our English gorse-
clad commons, or our beautiful dappled meadows-and

2 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

cornfields, all aglow with the infinite wealth of
poppies, bluebottles, foxgloves, ox-eye daisies, and
purple fritillaries. The Alps alone can equal the
brilliant colouring of our own native British flora.
Poor as it is in number of species—a mere isolated
fragment of the wider European groups—it can fear-
lessly challenge the rest of the whole world in general
mingled effect of gaiety and luxuriance.

Now, every one of these English plants and weeds
has a long and eventful story of its own. In the
days before the illuminating doctrine of evolution had
been preached, all we could say about them was that
they possessed such and such a shape, and size, and
colour: and if we had been asked why they were not
rounder or bigger or bluer than they actually are, we
could have given no sufficient reason, except that they ©
were made so. But since the great principle of de-
scent with modification has reduced the science of life
from chaos to rational order, we are able to do much
more than that. We can now answer confidently,
Such and such a plant is what it is in virtue of such
and such ancestral conditions, and it has been altered
thus and thus by these and those variations in habit
or environment. © Every plant or animal, therefore, be-
comes for us a puzzle to be explained, a problem to
be solved, a hieroglyphic inscription to be carefully

Introductory. 3

deciphered. In the following pages, I have taken
some half-dozen of familiar English weeds or flowers,
and tried thus to make them yield up the secret of
their own origin. Each of them is ultimately de-
scended from the common central ancestor of the
entire flowering group of plants ; and each of them has
acquired every new diversity of structure or appear-
ance for some definite and useful purpose. As a rule,
traces of all the various stages through which every
species has passed are still visibly imprinted upon
the very face of the existing forms: and one only re-
quires a little care and ingenuity, a little use of com-
parison and analogy, to unravel by their own aid the
story of their own remoter pedigree. This is the
method which I have here followed in the papers
that deal with the various modifications of the daisy,
of the grasses, of the lilies, of the strawberry, and of
the whole rose family.

Again, not only has each English plant a general
history as a species, but it has also a separate history
as a member of the British flora, Besides.the question
how any particular flower or fruit came to exist at all,
we have to account for the question how it came to
exist here and now in this, that, or the other part .of
the British Islands. For, of course, all plants are not
to be found in all parts of the world alike, and their

4 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

distribution over its surface has to be explained on
historical grounds just as a future ethnologist would
have to explain the occurrence of isolated French
communities in Lower Canada and Mauritius, of
African negroes in Jamaica and Brazil, or of Chinese
coolies in San Francisco and the Australian colonies.
In this respect, our English plants open out a series
of interesting problems for the botanical researcher ;
because we happen to possess a very mixed and frag-
mentary flora, made up to a great extent of waifs and
strays from at least three large distinct continental
groups, besides several casual colonists. Thus while
at Killarney we get a few rare Spanish or Portuguese
types, in Caithness and the Highlands we get a few.
rare Alpine or Arctic types: and while in Norfolk
and Suffolk we find some central European stragglers,
the ponds of the Hebrides are actually occupied by at
least one American pond-weed, its seeds having been
wafted over by®westerly breezes, or carried uncon-
sciously by water-birds-in the mud and ooze which
clung accidentally to their webbed feet. Moreover,
we know that at no very remote period, geologically
speaking, Britain was covered by a single great sheet
of glaciers, like that which now covers almost all
Greenland: and we may therefore conclude with
certainty that every plant at present in the country

Introductory, = 5

has entered it from one quarter and another at a date
posterior to that great lifeless epoch. This, then,
gives rise to a second set of problems, the problems
connected with the presence in England of certain
stray local types, Alpine or Arctic, Southern or
Transatlantic, European or Asiatic. Questions of
this sort I have raised and endeavoured to answer
with regard to two rare English plants in the papers
on the hairy spurge and the mountain tulip.

In short, these little essays deal, first with the
evolution of certain plant types in general; and
secondly with their presence as naturalised citizens of
our own restricted petty insular floral commonwealth.

6 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

L
THE DAISY’S PEDIGREE.
HAVE you ever paused for a moment to consider how

much man loses for want of that microscopic eye upon
whose absence complacent little Mr. Pope, after his

ZW Cid

Fic. 1.--The Common Daisy.

optimistic fashion, was apparently inclined rather to
congratulate his fellow-beings than otherwise ? What

The Datsy’s Pedigree. 7

a wonderful world we should all live in if only we
could see it as this little beetle here sees it, half
buried as he is in a mighty forest of luxuriant tall
green moss! Just fancy how grand and straight and
majestic those slender sprays must look to him, with
their waving, feathery branches spreading on every
side, a thousand times more gracefully than the long
boughs of the loveliest tropical palm trees on some
wild Jamaican hill-side. How quaint the tall cap-
sules must appear in his eyes—great yellow seed-
vessels nearly as big as himself, with a conical, pink-
edged hood, which pops off suddenly with a bang,”
and showers down monstrous nuts upon his head when
he passes beneath. Gaze closely into the moss forest,
as it grows here beside this smooth round stone where
we are sitting, and imagine you can view it as the
beetle views it. Put yourself in his place, and look
up at it towering three hundred feet above your head,
while you vainly strive to find your way among its
matted underbrush and dense labyrinths of close-
grown trunks, Then just look at the mighty mon-
sters that people it. The little red spider, magnified
to the size of a sheep, must be a gorgeous and strange-
looking creature indeed, with his vivid crimson body
and his mailed and jointed legs. Yonder neighbour
beetle, regarded as an elephant, would seem a terrible

8 Flowers nil their Pedigrees.

wild beast in all seriousriess, with his solid coat of
bronze-burnished armour, his huge hook-ringed an-
tennz, and his fearful branched horn, ten times more
terrible than that of a furious rhinoceros charging
madly through the African jungle. Why, if you will
only throw yourself honestly into the situation, and
realise that awful life-and-death struggle now going on
between an ant and a May-fly before our very eyes,
you will see that Livingstone, and Serpa Pinto, and
Gordon Cumming are simply nowhere beside you:
that even Jules Verne’s wildest story is comparatively
tame and commonplace in the light of that marvellous
miniature forest. Such a jumble of puzzle-monkeys,
and bamboos, and palms, and banyan trees, and crags,
and roots, and rivers, and precipices was never seen ;
inhabited by such a terrible and beautiful phantasma-
goria of dragons, hippogriffs, unicorns, rocs, chimzeras,
serpents, and wyverns as no mediaeval fancy ever in-
vented, no Grék mythologist ever dreamt of, and no
Arabian story-teller ever fabled. And yet; after all,
to our clumsy big eyes, it is but a little patch of
familiar English grass and mosses, crawled over by
half a dozen sleepy slugs and long-legged spiders, and
slimy earthworms.

Still, if you so throw yourself into the scene, you
cannot avoid carrying your own individuality with

The Datsy’s Pedigree. 9

you into the beetle’s body. You fancy him admiring
that fairy landscape as you would admire it were you
in his place, provided always you felt yourself quite
secure from the murderous jaws and hooked feet of
some gigantic insect tiger lurking in the bristly thicket
behind your back. But,as a matter of fact, I greatly
doubt whether the beetle has much feeling for beauty
of scenery. For a good many years past I have
devoted a fair share of my time to studying, from
‘such meagre hints as we possess, the psychology of
insects : and on the whole I am inclined to think that,
though their esthetic tastes are comparatively high
and: well-developed, they are, as a rule, decidedly
restricted in range. Beetles and butterflies only seem
to admire two classes of visible objects—their own
mates, and the flowers in which they find their food.
They never show much sign of deliberate love for
scenery generally or. beautiful things in the abstract
outside the limits of their own practical life., If this
seems a narrow zsthetic platform for an intelligent
butterfly, one must remember that our own country
bumpkin has perhaps a still narrower one; for the
only matter in which he seems to indulge in any dis-
tinct zsthetic preference, to exercise any active taste
for beauty, is in the choice of his sweetheart, and even

there he is not always conspicuous for the refinement

10 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

of his judgment. But there is a way in which one
can really to some extent throw oneself into the
mental attitude of a human being reduced in size so
as to look at the moss-forest with the eye of a beetle,
while retaining all the distinctive psychological traits
of his advanced humanity: and that is by making
himself a microscopic eye with the aid of a little
pocket-lens. Even for those who do not want to use
one scientifically, it opens a whole universe of new
and delightful scenery in every tuft of grass and every
tussock of wayside weeds; and by its aid I hope to
show you this morning how far the eyes and zsthetic
tastes of insects help us to account for the pedigree of
our familiar childish friend, the daisy. No fairy tale
was every more marvellous, and yet certainly no fairy —
tale was ever half so true.

I propose then, to-day, to dissect one of these
daisies with my little knife and glass, and unravel, if
I can, the tangfed skein of causes which have given it
its present shape, and size, and colour, and arrange-
ment. If you choose, you can each pick a daisy for
yourselves, and pull it to pieces as I go along, to check
off what I tell you; but if you are too lazy, or can’t
find one within reach, it doesn’t much matter; for
you can at least carry the picture of so common a
flower well enough in your mind’s eye to follow what

The Daisy's Pedigree. Il

I have to say without one: and -that is all that is at
all necessary for my present purpose.
The question as to how the daisy came to be what

it is, is comparatively a new one. Until a short time
ago everybody took it for granted that daisies had
always been daisies, cowslips always cowslips, and
primroses always primroses. But those new and truer
views of nature which we owe to Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Herbert Spencer have lately taught us that every
plant and every animal has a long history of its own,
and that this history leads us on through a wonderful
series of continuous metamorphoses compared with
‘which Daphne’s or Arethusa’s were mere single
episodes. The new biology shows us that every
living thing has been slowly moulded into its existing
shape by surrounding circumstances, and that it bears
upon its very face a thousand traces of its earlier
stages. It thus invests the veriest weed or the tiniest
insect with a fresh and endless interest: it elevates
them at once into complex puzzles for our ingenuity
—problems quite as amusing and ten times as in-
structive as those for whose solution the weekly
papers offer such attractive and unattainable prizes.
What is the meaning of this little spur? How did it
get that queer little point? Why has it developed
those fluffy little hairs? These are the questions

12 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

which now crop up about every part. of its form or
structure. And just as surely as in surveying Eng-
land we can set down Stonehenge and Avebury to
its prehistoric inhabitants, Watling Street and the
Roman Wall to its southern conquerors, Salisbury
and Warwick to medizval priests and soldiers, Liver-
pool and Manchester to modern coal and cotton—
just so surely in surveying a flower or an insect can
we set down each particular point to some special
' epoch in its ancestral development. This new view
of nature invests every part of it with a charm and
hidden meaning which very few among us have ever
suspected before. -
Pull your daisy to pieces carefully, and you will
see that, instead of being a single flower, as we
. generally suppose at a rough glance, it is in reality a _
whole head of closely packed and ve-y tiny flowers
seated together upon a soft fleshy disk. Of these
there are two kfnds. The outer florets consist each
of a single, long, white, pink-tipped. ray, looking very
much like a solitary petal: the inner ones consist
each of a small, golden, - bell-shaped blossom, with
stamens and pistil.in the centre, surrounded by a
yellow corolla much like that of a-Canterbury bell in
‘shape, though differing greatly from it in size and
colour. The daisy, in fact, is one of the great family

The Daisy ’s Pedigree. 13

of Composites, all of which have their flowers clustered
into similar dense heads simulating a single blossom,
and of which the sunflower forms perhaps the best
example, because its florets are quite large enough to
be separately observed even by the most careless
eye.

Now, if you look closely at one of the central

Fic. 2.—Ray floret of Daisy. Fic. 3.—Central floret of Daisy.

yellow’ florets in the daisy, you will see that its edge
is vandyked into four or five separate pointed teeth.
exactly like those of the Canterbury bell. These
teeth clearly point back to a time when the ancestors
of the daisy had five separate petals on each flower,
as a dog-rose or a May-blossom still has. Again,

14 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

before the flowers of the daisy had these five separate
petals, they must have passed through a still earlier
stage when they had no coloured petals at all. And
as it is always simpler and easier to recount history
in its natural order, from the first stages to the last,
rather than to trace it backward from the last to the
first, I shall make no apology for beginning the his-
tory of the daisy at the beginning, and pointing out
as we go along the marks which each stage has left
upon its present shape or its existing arrangement
and colour. ,

The very earliest ancestor of the daisy, then, with
which we need deal to-day, was an extremely simple
and ancient flower, hardly recognisable as such to any
save a botanical eye. .And here I must begin, I fear,
with a single paragraph of rather dull and technical
matter, lest you should miss the meaning of some
things I shall have to tell you in the sequel. If you
look into the ngiddle of a buttercup or a lily you know
that you will see certain little yellow spikes and
knobs within the petals, which form a sort of central
‘rosette, and look as if they were put there merely to
give finish and completeness to the whole blossom.
But in reality these seemingly unimportant spikes
and knobs are the most important parts, and the only
indispensable parts, of the entire flower. The bright

The Daisy’s Pedigree. 15

petals, which alone are what we generally have in our
minds when we think of flowers, are comparatively
useless and inessential organs: a vast number of
flowers have not got them at all, and, in those which
have got them, their purpose is merely subsidiary and
supplementary to that of the little central spikes and
knobs, For the small yellow rosette consists of the
stamens and pistils—the ‘essential floral organs,’ as

Fic. 4.—Longitudina! section of Common Buttercup,

botanists call them. A flower may be complete with
only a single stamen or a single pistil, apart from any
petals or other bright and conspicuous surroundings ;
and some of the simplest flowers do actually consist
of such separate parts alone: but without stamens
and pistils there can be no flower at all. The object
_of the flower, indeed, is to produce fruit and seed, and
the pistil is the seed-vessel in its earliest form ; while
the stamen manufactures the pollen’ without which

16 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

the seeds cannot possibly be matured within the cap-
sules. In some species the stamens and pistils occur
in separate flowers, or even on separate plants; in
others, the stamens and pistils occur on the same
plant or in the same flower, and this last is the case
in almost all the blossoms with which we are most
familiar. But the fundamental fact to bear in mind
is this—that the stamens and pistils are the real and
essential parts of the flower, and that all the rest is
leather and prunella—mere outer decoration of these
invariable and necessary organs. The petals and
other coloured adjuncts are, as I hope to show you,
nothing more than the ornamental clothing of the
true floral parts; the stamens and pistils are the
living things which they clothe and adorn. Now
probably you know all this already, exactly as the
readers of the weekly reviews know by this time all
about the personage whom we must not describe as ,
Charlemagnegor the beings whom it is a mortal sin
to designate as Anglo-Saxons. But then, just as
there are possibly people in the worst part of the
East End who still go hopelessly wrong about Karl
and the Holy Roman Empire, and just as there are
possibly people in remote country parishes who are
still the miserable victims of the great Anglo-Saxon
heresy, so, doubtless, there may yet be persons—say

The Daisy's Pedigree. 17

in the western parts of Cornwall or the Isle of Skye
--who do not know the real nature of flowers; and
these persons must not be wholly contemned because
they happen not to be so wise as we ourselves and the
Saturday Review. An eminent statistician calculates
that Mr. Freeman has demolished the truculent
Anglo-Saxon in 970 several passages, and yet there
are even now persons who go on firmly believing in
that mythical being’s historical existence. And the
moral of that is this, as the Duchess would say,
that you should never blame any one for telling you
something that you knew before ; for it is better that
ninety-nine wise men should be bored with a twice-
told tale, than that one innocent person should be left
‘in mortal error for lack of a short and not wholly
unnecessary elementary explanation, ,
The simplest and earliest blossoms, then—to
return from this didactic digression—were very small
and inconspicuous flowers, consisting, probably, of a
single stamen and a single pistil each. Of these
simplest and earliest forms a few still luckily survive
at the present day; for it is one of the rare happy
chances in this queerly ordered universe of ours that
-evolution has almost always left all its footmarks
behirid it, visibly imprinted upon the earth through
_all its ages, When any one form develops slowly
2

18 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

into another, it does not generally happen that the
parent form dies out altogether: on the contrary, it
‘usually lingers on somewhere, in some obscure and
unnoticed corner, till science at last comes upon it
unawares, and fits it into its proper place in the scale
of development. We have still several fish in the
very act of changing into amphibians left in a few
muddy tropical streams; and several oviparous
creatures in the very act of changing into mammals
left in the isolated continent of Australia ; and so
we have also many low, primitive, or simple forms of
plants and animals left in many stray situations in
every country. Amongst them are some of these
earliest ancestral flowers. On almost every wayside
‘pond you will find all the year round a green film of
slimy duckweed. This duckweed -is, as it were, the
Platonic idea of a flowering plant—the generic type
common to them all reduced to its simplest elements,
It has no rSots, no stem, no branches, no visible
blossom, no apparent seed ; it consists merely of soli-
tary, roundish, floating leaves, budding out at the
edge into other leaves, and so spreading till it covers
the whole pond. But if you look closely into the
slimy mass in summer time, you may be lucky
enough to catch the weed in flower—though not
unless you have a quick eye and a good pocket-lens.

The Daisy's Pedigree. 19

The flowers consist of one, and sometimes two,
stamens and a pistil, growing naked out of the edge
of the leaf. No one but a botanist could ever recog-
nise their nature at all, for they all look like mere
yellowish specks on the slender side of the green
frond ; but the pistil contains true seeds, and the

4

Fie. 5.—Frond and flower of Duckweed.

stamens produce true pollen, and from the botanical
‘standpoint that settles the question of their floral
nature at once. _ They are, in fact, representatives of
the simplest original form of flower, preserved to our
own day on. small stagnant ponds, where the com-
petition of other ‘plants does not press them hard as
it has pressed their congeners on dry land or in open

20 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

lakes and rivers.'|_ From some such simple form. as
this we may be pretty sure that all existing flowering
plants are ultimately descended.

In most modern flowers, however, each blossom
contains several stamens and several carpels (or pistil-
divisions), and the way in which such a change as
this might come about can be easily imagined ; for
even in many existing plants, where the separate
flowers have only a single stamen or a single pistil
each, they are nevertheless so closely packed together
that they almost form a single compound flower, as
in the case of the bur-reed and the various catkins,
not to mention the arum and the spurge, where only
a trained eye can make out the organic separateness.
I shall not. trouble you much, however, with these
earlier stages in the development of the daisy, both
‘ because I shall describe them elsewhere in part,
@ propos of other subjects, and because the later stages
are at once mofe interesting and more really instruc-
tive. It must suffice to say that at some very
ancient period the ancestors of the daisy, and. of
one half the other modern flowers, had acquired an
arrangement of stamens and pistils in groups of five,

1 In all probability, the duckweed is not itself a'rea!ly primitive
type, but.a degraded descendant of higher ancestors. This, however,
does not prevent it from standing as an excellent representative of the

real original unspecialised flowering p'ant, which must have Leen quite
as simple in structure.

The Daisy's Pedigree. 21

so that each compound flower had as a rule a pistil
of five or ten carpels, surrounded by a row of five
or ten stamens. And almost all their existing de-
scendants still bear obvious traces of this original
arrangement in rows of.fives, On the other hand,
the-ancestors of our lilies, and of the other half of our
modern flowers, had about the same period acquired

a, Carpels or ovaries ; 3, stamens ; ¢, petals; d, calyx.
Fic. 6.—Diagram of primitive dicotyledonous flower.

an arrangement in rows of three. And of this other
ternary arrangement all their existing descendants still
bear similar traces. In fact, most flowers at the
present day show clear signs of being derived either
from the original five-stamened or the original three-
stamened blossom. I don’t mean to say that this is
the only mark of distinction between the two great
groups: on the contrary, it is only a very minor one ; |

22 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

but it is for our present purpose the one of capital
importance.

The very primitive five-parted common ancestor
of the daisy, the rose, the buttercup, and our other
quinary flowers, was still an extremely simple and
inconspicuous blossom. It had merely green leaves
and plain flower-stems, surmounted by a row of five

ct.
rN
ds a2. ds,
b 42.

a, Carpels or ovaries ; 5, stamens, inner row ; ¢, stamens, outer row;
d, petals; e, calyx.

Fic. 7.—Didéram of primitive monocotyledonous flower.
cr ten stamens, inclosing five or ten carpels. Perhaps.
beneath them there may have been a little row of
cup-shaped green bracts, the predecessors of the calyx
which supports all modern flowers ; but of this we
cannot be at all sure. At any rate, it had no bright-
coloured petals. The origin of these petals is due to
the eyes and selective tastes of insects ; and we must

Lhe Datsy’s Pedigree. 23

look aside for a moment at the way in which they
have been produced, in order rightly to understand
the ancestry of the daisy.

No pistil ever grows into a perfect fruit or sets ripe
and good seeds until it is fertilised by a grain of pollen
from a stamen of its own kind. In some plants the
pollen is simply allowed to fall from the stamens on
to the pistil of the same flower ; but plants thus self-
fertilised are not so strong or so hearty as those
which are cross-fertilised by the pollen of another.
The first system resembles in its bad effect the habit
of ‘breeding in and in’ among animals, or of too
close intermarriages among human beings ; while the
second system produces the same beneficial results as
those of cross-breeding, or the introduction of ‘fresh
blood’ in the animate world. Hence, any early
plants which happened to be so constituted as to
allow of easy cross-fertilisation would be certain to
secure stronger and better seedlings than their self-
fertilised neighbours ; and wherever any peculiar form
or habit has tended to encourage this mode of setting
seeds, the plants have always prospered and thriven
exceedingly in the struggle for existence with their
less fortunate congeners. A large number of flowers
have thus become specially adapted for fertilisation
by the wind, as we see in the case of catkins and

24 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

grasses, where the stamens hang out in long pendu-
lous clusters, and the pollen is easily wafted by the
breeze from their waving filaments to the pistils of
surrounding flowers. In such cases as these, the
stamens are generally very long and mobile, so that’
the slightest breath shakes them readily ; while the
sensitive surface of the pistil is branched and feathery,
so as readily to catch any stray passing grain of wind-
borne pollen.

But there are other flowers which have adopted a
different method of getting the pollen conveyed from
one blossom to another, and this is upon the heads
and legs of honey-eating insects. From the very
first, insects must have been fond of visiting flowers
for the sake of the pollen, which they used to eat up
without performing any service to the plant in return,
as they still feloniously do in the case of several wind-
fertilised species ; and to counteract this bad habit on
the part of théir unbidden guests, the flowers seem to
have developed a little store of honey (which the
insects prefer to pollen), and thus to have turned their
visitors from plundering enemies into useful allies and
friends. For even the early pollen-eaters must often
unintentionally have benefited the plant, by carrying
pollen on their heads and legs from one flower to
another ; but. when once the plant took to producing

The Daisy's Pedigree. 25

honey, the insects largely gave up their habit of
plundering the pollen, and went from blossom to
blossom in search of the sweet nectar instead. As
they did so, they brushed the grains of pollen from
the stamens of one blossom against the pistil of the
next, and so enabled the flowers to set their seed
more economically than before. .

Simultaneously with this change from fertilisation
by the wind to fertilisation by insects, there came in
another improvement in the mechanism of flowers.
Probably the primitive blossom consisted only of
stamens and pistil, with, at best, a single little scale
or leaf as a protection to each. But some of the five-
rowed flowers now began to change the five stamens
of the outer row into petals ; that is to say, to produce
broad, bright-coloured, and papery flower-rays in the
place of these external stamens. The reason why
they did so was to attract the insects by their brilliant
hues ; or, to put it more correctly, those flowers which
happened to display brilliant hues.as a matter of fact
attracted the insects best, and so got fertilised oftener
than their neighbours. This tendency on the part of
stamens to grow into petals is always very marked,
and by taking advantage of it gardeners are enabled
to produce what we call double flowers ; that is to
say, flowers in. which-all the stamens have been thus

26 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

broadened and flattened into ornamental rays. Even
amongst wild flowers, the white water-lily shows us
every gradation between fertile pollen-bearing true
stamens and barren broad-bladed petals. To put it
shortly and dogmatically, petals are in every case
merely specialised stamens, which have given up
their original function of forming pollen, in order to
adopt the function of attracting insects.

Fic. 8.—Transition from stamen to petal in White Water-lily.

The five-rowed ancestors of the daisy found a
decided advantage in thus setting apart one outer
row of stamens as coloured advertisements to lure the
insects to the honey, while they left. the inner rows to
do all the real work of pollen-making. They very
rapidly spread over the world, and assumed very
various forms in various places. But wherever they
went, they always preserved more or less trace of -
their quinary arrangement; and to this day, if you
pick almost any flower belonging to the same great.

The Daisy's Pedigree. By

division of dicotyledons (the name is quite unim-
portant), you will find that it has at least some trace
of its original arrangement in rows of five. The
common stonecrop and its allies keep up the arrange-
ment best of any; for they have each, as a rule, five
petals; each petal has its separate bract, making a
calyx or flower-cup of five pieces or sepals; inside
are one or two rows of five stamens each ; and in the
centre, a pistil of five carpels. Such complete and
original symmetry as this is not now common ; but
almost all the five-rowed flowers retain the same gen-
eral character in a somewhat less degree. The but-
tercup, for example, has one outer row of five sepals,
then five petals, and then several crowded rows of
stamens and carpels. And in the petals at least the
harmony is generally complete. There are five in
the dog-rose, in the violet, in the pea-blossom, in the
pink, in the geranium, and (speaking generally) in
almost every plant that grows in our gardens,
our fields, or our woodlands, unless it belongs to
the other great division of trinary flowers, with
all their organs in groups of three. And now, if |
you will pull open oné of the inner yellow florets of
your daisy, you will see that it has five stamens
and five little lobes to the bell-shaped corolla, to
show its ancestry piainly on its face, and ‘to witness
if I lie.’

28 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

But the original bright coloured ancestor of the
daisy must have had five separate petals, like the
dog-rose or the apple-blossom at the present day.
How then did these petals grow together into a single
bell-shaped corolla, as we see them now in the finished
daisy? Well, the stages and the reasons are not
difficult to guess. As flowers and insects went on
developing side by side, certain flowers learnt to
adapt themselves better and better to their special
insects, while the insects in return learnt to adapt
themselves better and better to their special flowers.
As -bees and butterflies got a longer. proboscis with
which to dive after honey into the recesses of the
blossoms, the blossoms on their part got a deeper
tube in which to hide their honey from all but the
proper insects. Sometimes this is done, as in the
larkspur, the violet, and the garden nasturtium, by
putting the honey at the bottom of a long spur or
blind sac ; and¢if you bite off the end of the sac in
the nasturtium you will find a very appreciable quan-
tity of nectar stored up in it. But most highly spe-
cialised flowers have hit upon a simpler plan, which
is to run all their petals togethér at the bottom into a
tube, so long that no useless insect can rob the honey
without fertilising the plant, and so arranged that the
proboscis of the bee or butterfly can rub against.the

The Daisy’s Pedigree. 29

stamens and pistil on the way down. In pinks and
their allies we see some rude approach to this mode
of growth ; for there each petal has a long claw (as it
is called), bearing the expanded part at the end ; and
these claws when firmly pressed together by the calyx
practically form a tube in five pieces : but in the per-

Fic. 9.—Corolla of Primrose. Fic. 10.—Corolla of Harebell.

fectly tubular flowers, like the primrose, the arrange-
ment is carried a great deal further ; for there. we
have the claws all grown into a single piece, with the
expanded petals forming a continuous fringe of five
deeply cleft lobes, representing the five original and
separate pieces of the pinks.’ Now, in the. primrose,
again, we still find the five petals quite distinct at the

‘'! Of course Ido not mean to imply that daisies or primroses are
descended from pinks; that would convey a wholly mistaken notion ;
but merely. that the ancestors of the daisy once passéd through a some-
what analogous stage.

30 Flowers and ther Pedigrees.

edge, though their lower portion has grown together
into a regular tube; but in the harebell or the Can-
terbury bell we see that the whole blossom has be-
come bell-shaped, and that the five originally separate
petals are only indicated by five slightly projecting
points or lobes which give the tubular corolla its van-
dyked margin. And if you look at the little central
florets of the daisy or the sunflower, you will observe
that they too exactly resemble the Canterbury bell in
this particular. Hence we can see that their ances-
tors, after passing through stages more or less analo-
gous to those of the pinks and the primroses, at last
reached a completely united and tubular or campanu-
late form, like that of the heath or the Canterbury
bell.

There is one minor point, however, in the develop-
ment of the daisy which I only notice because I am
so afraid of that terrible person, the microscopic critic.
This very learmed and tedious being goes about the
world proclaiming to everybody that you don’t know
something because you don’t happen to mention it;
and for fear of him one is often obliged to trouble
one’s readers with petty matters of detail which really:
make no difference at all except to such Smelfun-
guses in person. Being themselves accustomed to
weary us with the whole flood of their own unspeak-

The Datsy’s Pedigree. 31

able erudition, every time they open their mouths,
they imagine that everybody else must be ignorant of
anything which he doesn’t expressly state ; as though
you might never talk of a railway journey without
giving at full the theory of kinetic energy as applied
to the coal in the furnace. For their sake, then, I
must add that, when the daisy’s ancestors had reached
a level of development equivalent to that-of the heath
and the Canterbury bell, they differed in one respect
from them just as the primrose still does. In the
heath and the harebell, the stamens remain quite
separate from the tube formed by the petals ; but in
the primrose and the daisy the stalks of the stamens
(filaments, the technical botanists |
call them) have coalesced with the

petals, so that the pollen seems to

hang out in little bags from the

walls of the tube itself. This is

a further advance in the direction

of specialised arrangements for

insect-fertilisation ; and it shows

Fic, 11.
Section of floret of Daisy.

very simply the sort of cross-
connections which we often get i
among plants or animals. For while the daisy is
more like the Canterbury bell in the shape of its
corolla, it is more like the primrose in the arrange-

= Fiowers and their Pedigrees.

ment of its stamens. Or, to put it more plainly,
while the Canterbury bell has hit upon one mode
of adaptation in the form of its tube, and while
the primrose has hit upon another mode in the in-
sertion of its stamens, the daisy has hit upon both
' together, and has combined them in a single flower.
And now, my dear Smelfungus, having given way to
your prejudices upon this matter, allow me to assure
you that nothing will induce me to enter into the
further and wholly immaterial difference between
hypogynous and epigynous corollas. For every one
but you, the very names, I am sure, will be quite
sufficient apology for my reticence. These, in fact,
are subjects which, like the ‘old familiar Decline and
Fall off the Rooshian Empire,’ had better be discussed
‘in the absence of Mrs. Boffin.’

When the ancestors of the daisy had reached the
stage of united tubular blossoms, like the harebell,
with stamens® fastened. to the inside wall of the tube,
like the primrose, they must, on the whole, have re-
sembled in shape the flowers of the common wild
white comfrey, more nearly than any other familiar
English plant. The next step was to crowd a lot of
these bell-shaped: blossoms: together into a compact
head. If you compare a cowslip with a primrose,
you can easily understand how this is done. Accord-

The Daisy’s Pedigree. - | 33

ing to many of our modern botanists, cowslips and
primroses are only slightly divergent varieties of a
single species ; and in any case they are very closely
related to one another. But in the primrose the
separate blossoms spring each on a long stalk of its
own from near the root ; while in the cowslip, the
common stem from which they all spring is raised
high above the ground, and the minor flower-stalks
are much shortened. Thus, instead of a bunch of
distinct flowers, you get a loose head of crowded
flowers. Increase their number, shorten their stalks
a little more, and pack them closely side by side, and
you would have a compound or composite flower like
the daisy. In fact, we often find in nature almost
every intermediate stage: for instance, among the
pea tribe we have all but solitary flowers in the peas
and beans, long clusters in the laburnum and wistaria,
and compact heads in the clovers. The daisies and
other composites, it is true, carry this crowding of
- flowers somewhat further than almost any other
plants ; but still even here you can trace a gradual
progress, some approach to their habit being made by
allied families elsewhere ; while some composites, on
the other hand, have stopped short of the pitch of
development attained by most of their race. Thus,
certain campanulas have their flowers packed tightly

34 Flowers and thar Pedigrees.

together into a head, which looks at first sight a
single blossom, just as deceptively as the daisy does ;
and a still nearer relative, the scabious, even more
strikingly resembles the composite form. So that
the daisies and their allies have really only carried
out one step further a system of crowding which had
been already begun by many other plants.

Fic. 12.—Section of head of Daisy.

If you look closely at the daisy, you will see in
what this crowding consists. The common flower-
stalk is flattened out at the end into a regular disk,
and on this @isk all the florets are seated with no
appreciable separate flower-stalks of their own. Out-
side them a double row of leaves is arranged, exactly
like the calyx in single flowers, and serving the same
protective purpose—-to preserve the florets from the
incursions of unfriendly insects ; while inside, the little
individual blossoms have almost lost their own
calyxes which are scarcely represented by a few tiny

oe

The Daisy's Pedigree. 35

protuberances upon the seed-like fruit. In the daisy,
indeed, we may say that the'true calyx has been
dwarfed away to nothing; but in the dandelion and
many other composites a new use has been found for
it; it has been turned into those light feathery hairs
which children call ‘the clock,’ and which aid the dis-
persion of the seeds by wafting them about before the
wind.

Now, what has made the daisy and the other
composites grow so small and thick-set? Probably
the need for attracting insects. By thus combining
their mass of bloom they are enabled to make a great
show in the world, and to secure the fertilisation of a
great many flowers at once by each insect which visits
the head. For each floret has its own little store of
honey, its own stamens, and its own pistil containing
an embryo fruit ; and when a bee lights upon a daisy |
head, he turns round and round, extracting all he can
get from every tiny tube, and so fertilising the whole
number of florets at a single time. The result at
least proves that the principle is a good one ; for few
flowers get so universally fertilised, or set their seed
so regularly, as the composites. Though they must

“have reached their present very high state of evolution
at a comparatively recent period, they have. spread
already over the whole world ; and they are far more

36 flowers and their Pedigrees.

numerous, both in individuals, in species, and in
genera, than any other family of flowering plants. In
fact, they are undoubtedly the dominant tribe of the
whole vegetable kingdom. When I say that in
Britain alone they number no less than 120 species,
including such common and universal weeds as the
_ daisy, dandelion, thistles, groundsel, camomile, milfoil,
hawkweed, and burdock, it will be clear that nine out of
every ten ordinary wayside blossoms which we see on
any country walk are members of this highly evolved,
ubiquitous, and. extremely successful family.

Still, we are far from having finished the pedigree
of the daisy. We have traced its general genealogy
down as far as the common composite stock: we
have ‘now to trace its special derivation from the early
common composite type to the distinctive daisy form.
Clearly one great point in the daisy’s history is yet
untouched upon ; and that is the nature and meaning
of the white*rays. We know that the inner yellow
florets are (as it were) dwarfed and specialised golden
harebells ; but we do not yet know what is the origin
of these long outer streamers, which look so wholly
unlike the tiny and regular central bells.

In solving this problem, the other composites will
help us not a little ; for we must always-seek in the
simpler for the interpretation of the more complex ;

The Daisy's Pedigree. 37

and the daisy, instead of being the simplest, is one
of the most developed representatives of the compo-
site ‘pattern. If you turn to that tall, rank-looking
weed growing yonder, under cover of the hedge, you
will get a good surviving example of the earliest form
of composite. The weed is a eupatory—‘hemp
agrimony’ the country people call it—and it has
small heads, each containing a few tubular purple
florets, all exactly the same size and shape, and all
much more loosely gathered together than in the
daisy or the dandelion. The eupatory is interesting
as preserving for us one of the first stages in the
ancestry of the higher composites, after they had
attained to their distinctive family characteristics.
Once more, I don’t wish you to understand that the
daisies are descended from the eupatory: all I mean ~
-is, that their ancestors must once have passed through
an analogous stage ; and that the eupatory has never
‘got beyond it, while the daisies have gone on«still »
further differentiating and adapting themselves till
they reached their present peculiar form. Now, if
you compare this daisy with the head of eupatory,
you will see that they differ in two particulars—the
daisy has outer rays, while the eupatory has none ;
and the inner daisy florets are yellow, while the
eupatory florets are purple. The latter difference is

38 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

one into which we cannot enter now: it must suffice
to say that when the daisy’s ancestors were in the
eupatory stage of development they had apparently
all their florets yellow. This is likely, because almost
all the modern composites of every sort have yellow
central florets, and most of them have yellow rays as
well. It is only a few kinds that have red or purple
central florets ; and, as we shall soon see, only a few
also that have white or pink outer rays.

What, then, made the daisy’s ancestors produce a
row of external florets so different in shape and
colour from the internal ones? The answer is
exactly analogous to that which I have already given
for the origin of petals themselves. Compare the
eupatory with the daisy once more, and you will see
that the one is comparatively inconspicuous, while
the other is very noticeable and bright-coloured. The
row of green bracts almost hides the blossoms of the
eupatory ; bit the large white rays make a bold and
effective advertisement for the daisy. Certain com-
posites, in fact, have just repeated the same device by
which the earliest petal-bearing flowers sought to
attract the notice of insects. Those early flowers, as
we saw, set apart one outer row of stamens as bright-
‘coloured petals ; these later compound flower-heads
have set apart one outer row of florets as_bright-

The Daisy’s Pedigree. 39

coloured rays. If you examine the rays closely, you
will see that each of them is a separate little flower,
with the stamens suppressed, and with the bell- .
shaped corolla flattened out into a long and narrow ©
ribbon. Even these very abnormal corollas, how-
ever, still retain a last trace of the five original dis-
tinct petals; for their edge is slightly notched with
five extremely minute lobes, often nearly obliterated,
but sometimes quite marked, and almost always more
or less noticeable on a careful examination. A daisy
thus consists of a whole head of tiny tubular bells,
the inner ones normal and regular, with corolla,
stamens, and pistil, and the outer ones flattened or
ligulate, with the.stamens wanting, and the entire
floret simply devoted to increasing the attractiveness
of the compound mass. Pull off the rays, and you
will see at once what an inconspicuous flower the
daisy would be without them.

Last of all, the question arises, Why are the outer
florets or rays pink and white, while the inner florets
or bells are golden yellow? - When we have solved
that solitary remaining problem, we shall have settled
the chief points in the daisy’s pedigree. Clearly,
when the rays were ‘first produced, they must have
been yellow like the central florets. - The mere
flattening and lengthening of the corolla would not

40 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

in itself tend to alter the colour. And as a matter of
fact, the vast mass of those composites: which have
progressed to the stage of having rays-~which have
got these two separate forms of flowers, for show and
for use respectively—have the rays of the same colour
_as the central bells, that is to say, generally yellow.
Of this stage. the sunflower. is a familiar and very
striking representative. It has bright golden central
florets, and large expanded rays of the same colour.
To anybody who wants to study the structure of the
daisy without a microscope, the sunflower is quite as
valuable and indispensable’ as it is to our most
advanced zsthetic school in painting and decoration.
Moreover, it shows us admirably this intermediate
stage, when the compound flower-head has acquired a
distinct row of outer attractive florets, adding wealth
and expansiveness to its display of colour, but when
it has not yet attempted any specialisation of hue in
these purely ornamental. organs. The daisy, how-
ever, together with the camomile, the ox-eye daisy,
and many ‘other similar composites, has carried the
process one step further. It has coloured its rays.
white, and has even begun to tinge them with pink.
This makes these highest of all composites the most
successful plants in the whole world. .If one con-
siders that daisies begin to bloom on January I, and

The Daisy’s Pedigree. _ 41

go on flowering till December 31 ; that they occur in
almost every field far’ more abundantly than ‘any
other blossom ; and ‘that each one of them is not a
single flower, but a whole head of flowers—it will be
quite clear that they are much more numérous than
any rival species. And when we add to them the
other very common white-rayed composites, such as
the camomiles, many of which abound almost as freely
in their own haunts and at their proper season, it is
obvious that this highly evolved composite type is the
dominant plant race of the old world at least. In the
new world, their place is taken. by a somewhat more
developed type still, that of the Michaelmas daisies,
which have their rays.even:more ornamental than our
own, and brightly coloured with mauve or lilac pig-
ment. All the world over, however, in and out of the
tropics, the commonest, most numerous, and. most
‘successful of plants are ray-bearing composites of one
kind or another, like the daisies, with the rays differ-
ing in colour from the central. florets. a!
Finally, it may, perhaps, at first hearing, sound
absurd to say that the daisy. group, including these
other composites with tinted rays, forms the very head
and crown of the vegetable creation,.as man does in
the animal creation: and yet it is none the less true.
We: are’ so ‘accustomed ‘to ‘look’ upon a daisy, as’.
3

42 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

humble, commonplace, almost insignificant little flower,
that it seems queer to hear it described as a higher
type of plant:life than the tall pine-tree or the spread-
ing oak. But, asia.matter of fact, the pine is a very
low: type.indeed, as is also the giant tree of California,
both of them'belonging to the earliest and simplest
surviving family. of flowering plants, the conifers,
which are no better, comparatively speaking, among
‘plants, than the monstrous saurians and_fish-like
réptiles of the secondary age were among. animals.
If: size were any criterion of relative development,
then the »whale would take precederice .of all other
mammals, and man would rank somewhere below the
gorilla and the grizzly bear. But if we take complexity
and perfection in thé adaptation of the organism to
its surtoundings as our gauge of comparative evolu-
tion, then the daisies. must rank in the very first line
of plant.‘economy. For if we follow down their
pedigree in the inverse order, we shall see that, inas-
much as they have coloured rays, they are superior to
all their yellow-rayed allies. (for example, the -sun-
flower); and inasmuch as these have rays, they are
supérior .to. all..rayless composites. (for example, the
eupatory):;.:and inasmuch as composites generally
have ‘clustered. heads, they are. superior to all other
flowers with separate tubular corollas (for example,

The Daisy’s Pedigree. 43

the heathers) ; while all these, again, are superior to
those with separate petals (for example, the roses) ;
and all petalled flowers are superior to all petalless
kinds (for example, the pines and oaks). . Thus, from
the strict biological point -of view, it becomes quite
clear--that the daisies, asters, chrysanthemums, and
other rayed composites with coloured outer florets,
really stand to other plants in the same relation as
man stands towards other animals. That is what
gives such a special and exceptional interest to the
' daisy’s pedigree. 2

44 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

IL.
THE ROMANCE OF A WAYSIDE WEED.

You will not find many pleasanter or breezier walks
in England than this open stretch of Claverton Down:
certainly you will find very few with more varied
interest of every conceivable sort for every cultivated
mind. The air is fresh and laden from the brine of
the Atlantic and the Gulf Stream ; the clear wind is
blowing straight from seaward, not keen and dry from
the Eastern plains, but soft and pure from a thousand
leagues of uninterrupted ocean ; and the view over
the broken dale of Avon, where it cuts its way ina
veritable gorge through the high barrier of the Bath
oolite, stretches for miles over one of the loveliest and
greenest valleys in all our lovely green England.
More than that—the whole history of Britain is visibly
unfolded before my very eyes. That bald roundish
hill to the right, with its smooth summit artificially
levelled, and its sides planed down into a long glacis,
is Little Solisbury ; and Little Solisbury, as its name
clearly shows, is the very oldest Bath of all. For it is

The Romance af a Wayside Weed. 45

the bury or hill-fort of Solis, the ancient fortified town
of the Keltic and Euskarian natives ; and when, long
ages afterwards, the Romans planted their station in
the valley below, they naturally called the hot springs

Fic. 13. Hairy Wood-spurge (euphorbia pilosa).
which they found there by the name of Aquz Solis ;
and equally naturally misinterpreted the second word

(really a native term, Sulis) as the genitive of Sol, and
accordingly dedicated their great temple on the spot

46 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

to Apollo. Those straight white lines and green-
grown ridges on the flanks of Banagh Down and’ the
eastern heights are the vestiges of the old Roman
‘causeways—the Fosse and its branches—now totally
disused or else degraded into modern cart-roads ; and
the Institution Buildings in the valley below cover or
contain all the remaining memorials of the stately
Roman town. . “Back of me again, on Hampton Down,
stand the eatthworks of Caer Badon, the later British
village, planted there when fear of the heathen West
Saxon invaders had driven back the Christian Welsh-
man to the hills which he had deserted for the fruitful
valley during the security of the Pax Romana; and
this long mound, on whose summit I am standing to
catch the view, actually forms part-of Wansdyke, the
great boundary barrier behind which the Welshmen
of the Somersetshire principality entrenched them-
selves, after the pagan English pirates had taken pos-
session of thé Avon dale and of Bath itself. The
decisive battle which settled the fate of the city was
fought at Dyrham Park, among those blue downs on
the northern horizon ; and the tiny village of English-
combe, nestling below the solitary beacon of High
Barrow Hill ‘on my left, marks in its very name the
furthest westward extension of the Teutonic settlers
towards the ‘ever-unconquered recesses of Mendip.

The Romanie of a Wayside Weed. — 47

As to later associations, they: are too endless for
review. In the foreground lies the town, and from its
midst towers the abbey, the last flickéring effort of
English architecture before the Reformation. choked
out its life.for ever ; a tall and stately but very cold
specimen.of good late perpendicular: work. It rises
above the ancient temple of Minerva, and ‘covers frag:
ments. of the older. minsters—that which Osric, king
of the Worcester men, gave to a nunnery in’ 671;
that which Offa of Mercia raised-in’775 ; that : where
Eadgar, first king of all England; was -crowned in
973 :.and that. which the Angevin John of Tours
erected in 1160. There to the right is Lansdown;
where the Parliament’s men tinder: Waller all but
‘wiped out the stout Cornishmen -who ‘stood up. for
their king’ under Sir Bevil. Grenville in a fruitless
victory ; and the big tower on -the:top is Beckford’s
Folly, built in. a fit of Oriental recklessness’ by.
‘Vathek’ Beckford, and now the landmark of the
cemetery which. spreads: over his ‘vanishéd domain:
In the combe to.-the left, again, that huge pseudo-
classical manor-house is Prior Park,.the vast rambling
home of Ralph Allen ; and ‘Ralph Allen was the ori-
ginal of Squire Allworthy, whose grounds, as minutely
‘described in ‘ Tom Jones,’ are here actually realised:
But if I went on talking all day I should :never -have

48 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

finished ; for the history of the Bath valley, as seen
from Claverton Down, is, as I said before, the history
of all. England, visibly. epltotniised in tangible realities
before one’s. very eyes.

' However, I have not come out to-day to hunt for
old relics among the works of:'Caer Badon, or to trace
the curious bends: and angles: of Wansdyke. © A far
older.and stranger chapter of our history than any of
these is unfolded by the little wayside weed which I
have here in. my botanical case; and it was to find
this very commonplace . and uninteresting-looking
plant that I have. come out this morning. For the
weed is'the hairy wood-spurge, and Claverton Down
is the only place in-Great Britain where that parti-
cular kind of spurge still ‘lingers on. -I have got my
British. Flora safe here in my satchel ; and now I am
going ‘to. sit down on the slope of Wansdyke and
make quite sure that my plant really tallies. exactly
with Dr. Bentham’s description ; -for if it actually does,
then I shall have the pleastire of knowing that I hold
in my hand one of the few genuine links which yet
unite us with. a very distant past-—a_ past compared
with which the ‘days. when Wansdyke was built, or
even when Little Solisbury was fortified; seem com-
paratively. recent.» If this is in fact the hairy wood-
spurge,! it and its ancestors have been” growing here

See fig. 13.

The Romance of a fie peed Weed. 49

on Claverton Down ever - since jie “en of the last
£lacial epoch ;. and it-is a relic of the flora which once
bloomed among the lowlands that. connected Eng-
Jand> and - Ireland | with Brittany, Spain, and the
‘Pyrenees, It dates back, in short, to the time when
Britain was ‘still an integral part of the European
‘continent. om
_A few minutes’ examination with my porketlens”
is quite enough to assure me that the flower I have
picked is truly the wood-spurge of-which I am in
‘search. It is a queer, insignificant little plant, with
funny cup-like green flowers, and odd jelly-bag
glands, very much like most other English spurges:;
-but I see at once on a-closer examination that it -has
all the distinguishing marks of the hairy species—the
woolly: underside to the leaves, the dotted seed-cap-
sules, the loose umbels of blossom, and the leng
branched rays supporting: the straggling flower-heads, "
I regard it, therefore, as a decided find ; for the lane
‘that. bounds. the Prior Park estate, and this bit. of
‘woodland on the summit of Claverton Down, are the
‘only spots in England. where this particular plant: is
iow found, - But that is not all. “In itself, the fact of
its rarity would not be enough to arouse arly special
-interest ; for there:are many other wild flowers found
-in.only one spot in Britain—sometimes garden kinds

‘50 = Flowers and their Pedigrees.

escaped from cultivation in’ a suitable climate, some-
times American straylings, and sometimes high
“Alpine species requiring a particular granite, basalt,
or limestone soil—a soil perhaps to be met with in
our islands only on one or two scattered Welsh or
Scottish hills of the requisite height. The case of the
hairy spurge, however, is very different from any of
“these. It is a southern European and Western
Asiatic plant, and it spreads along the Mediterranean
basin from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees; but it
‘nowhere comes any nearer to Britain than the valley
of the Loire. This is what gives it’ such’a special
‘interest in my eyes. It is not found in Brittany, it is
not found in Normandy, it is not found on the oppo-
site coast of Picardy, it is not found in Kent or
Essex ; but it suddenly reappears here, out’ of -all
“reckoning, on Claverton Down. :
If the case of the wood-spurge were a solitary one,
‘it would be eas$ enough to give a ready explanation.
The neighbourhood of Bath is known to be one of the
warmest ‘spots ‘in England, having, in ‘fact, its own
hot-water supply always laid on. This is a plant of
warm countries. A bird, let us say, once brought
over a single seed, clinging to its feet or feathers; an
exotic flower, imported for the shrubberies of Prior
-Park, was packed in earth containing young spurges ;

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 51

a sailor introduced it by some’chance; a: botanist
sowed it here for’ an expériment. Nay, perhaps ‘a
Roman settler at Aquz’ Solis brought it over with the
plants for his Italian garden. In such or the! ‘like
casual manner it got a footing on Claverton Down ;
and, as the climate suited it, it has gone on flourishing
ever since. Here, I say, would be an easy explana-
tion if the case of the hairy spurge were a solitary
one ; but, as a matter of fact, there are hundreds of
cases exactly like it. It is quite a common occur-
rence to find a plant extend all through Europe from
the Caucasus to the Pyrenées, then stop suddenly
short, and turn up again once more incontinently
in Devon, Cornwall, Kerry, dnd Connemara. This is
such a curious fact that it really seems to call for
some adequate explanation.

Let me begin by noting a few of the most striking
instances. There is,in the Bristol Channel a solitary
rocky islet known: by the old Scandinavian title of
the Steep Holme—a name given to it, no doubt, by
the wickings of the ninth century, who made it their
headquarters for plundering the chapmen and slave-
mongers of wealthy Bricgstow. Now the’rocky clefts
of the Steep: Holme are still crimson-in May and
June with the brilliant red. blossoms of the: wild
peony, a flower which: does not elsewhere. appear

52 ... Flowers and their Pedigrees. ~

nearer to. England than the Pyrenees.. Not far from |
Axminster in Devon,-again, there is a warm sheltered
nook in which nestles. the little village of Kilmington.
Well, Kilmington.Commion is a place famous to

Fic. 14.—Flowers of common Monkshood.
botanists, because it is the one single station: ‘in
Britain for.a small purplish lobelia, which ranges
elsewhere only from’ Andalusia to central France,

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 53,

Dozens of like cases may be noted in the south-
western peninsula of England and the similarly situ-
ated corner of Wales about Pembrokeshire.’ Thus, to
lump a long list briefly, the common blue monksliood
is.found wild in South Wales and the Cornish district
only ; the yellow draba is confined to old walls about
Pennard Castle, near Swansea; the spotted rock-
cistus occurs only in the Channel Islands and at
Holyhead ; the white rock-cistus is peculiar in Britain
to Brent Downs in Somerset, together with Torquay
and Babbicombe in Devon ; the Cheddar pink, a
volcanic’ plant of southern Europe, clings to the
crannies of the Cheddar cliffs near Wells, and to no
other crag in England ; the soapwort is wild ‘only in
Cornwall:and Devon ; the flax-leaved St. John’s wort
grows nowhere but at Cape ‘Cornwall and on the
banks of the-Teign ; the crimson clover and -Boccone’s
clover are entirely restricted to the peninsula of the
‘Lizard ; so also is the upright clover, save that it is
likewise found in the Channel Islands ; the sand bird’s
foot remains only at Scilly ; the ‘Bithynian vetch ex-
tends through Europe as far north as Bordeaux, and
ther disappears again till after a sudden leap it is
gathered ‘once more in Devon and Cornwall ;. the
white ‘sedum ‘occurs in the Malvern Hills ‘and. in
Somersetshire'; and the narrow buplever flowers: only

all, if not in all; these cases the plant is a southern one,
which extends usually from the Caspian to Spain, is
perhaps found ds far north as the Gironde or even
the. Loire, and then disappears again till it turns up
suddenly in some exceptionally sheltered nook of
Devon; Cornwall, or South ‘Wales. This is a pheno-
menon which carinot: surely be due to chance alone.
Indeed, I might greatly increase the list, but I refrain
only -because I am afraid of being wearisome.

When we turn to the similarly placed south-
western corner of Ireland, the peculiarities we meet
are even more remarkable. I shall never forget my
surprise when once; after my first visit to Nice and
Mentone, I began describing the beautiful Provengal
flowers to an Irish botanist, and was quietly an-
swered, ‘Ah, yes; we have them. all at Killarney.’
But it is really true none the less... The thick-leaved
sedum, after slipping all England and Wales, shows
itself suddenly in the ‘Cove of Cork: The pretty
Mediterranean heath, which every winterer at Pau
has gathered by handfuls on the hills about Eaux
Chaudes or Cauterets, jumps at a bound.to the coast
of Kerry. The arbutus, with its clustering white
blossoms and beautiful red berries, is similarly found
in Provence and again at Glengariff. London Pride

The Roniance of a Wayside Weed. 55

grows wild in Portugal, western Spain, and the higher

' Pyrenees, and reappears in south-western Ireland.
Another pretty little saxifrage jumps in like. manner
from the Asturias to Killarney... St. Dabeoc’s heath
has the same'range. The spiked orchid takes a great
bound from Bordeaux to a Single station in County
Galway. To sum it up shortly, ‘Crete, Auvergne,
the Pyrenees, S.-W. Ireland, isa common technical
description of the distribution of many beautiful south
European plants.

g Fic. 15.—Flower and fruit of Arbutus.

Now, these peculiarities of distribution lead me up
pretty surely: to the romance of the hairy wood-spurge.
They show that it did not get here by accident. - Like
the elephant-headed god of the Mexicans, like the
debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, they
raise an immediate curiosity as to their origin,..-What
we may call the natural: range of British “plants is of
this sort: they have entered the country from the
Continent, vid Kent, Sussex, East Anglia, or Scotland ;
and they fail for the most part under three great
divisions. ‘The first division consists of central Euro-

56 © Flowers and their Pedigrees.

pean plants, which seem-as if they had come ii from
the east: and of these a few get no farther than the -
eastern counties ; a great many spread over the whole
country ; and the remainder have reached to the west
and to Ireland. The second -division is that of the
Scandinavian plants, which seem as if they had: come
in from ‘the north; and of ‘these a few stop short
in Shetland, Orkney, or the Highlands; others get
as far as the midland counties; and a good many
straggle on into Kent or Cornwall. The third division
comprises the mountain plants, which have come in
from various quarters, and which grow wherever the
elevation and the mountain air suit their constitutions.
But my wood-spurge agrees with none of these, and
it clearly belongs to another southern class, which
cannot have entered Britain by any of the customary
routes vid Dover, Harwich, or Southampton. © It
seems to have taken a route of its own, and to have
attacked England ‘by way of Bristol and Bordeaux.
Otherwise, we should find it and the other peculiar
west-country species: in the warmer parts of Kent;
Surrey, and the Isle of Wight, which, as a matter of
fact,-we never do. If climate were the only agent at
work, Ventnor certainly has as good claims as any
place in England. :
Perhaps it seems a useless question to inquire how

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 57

they came there at all, ‘Were they not always there?’
somebody may ask me. And the answer is, No,
undoubtedly not. You might as well explain the —
‘presence of an English-speaking colony on Pitcairn
Island by the hypothesis that Englishmen were
originally created in two separate -centres—Great
Britain and the South Pacific. Only some 80,000
years since—a mere single swing of the cosmical
pendulum—every inch of Great Britain and Ireland,
save only an insignificant southern ‘fringe, was
wholly covered by the ice of the last glacial period.
‘We know the date with mathematical certainty,
because the astronomical conditions upon which
glacial periods have been shown almost beyond doubt
to depend, began 200,000 years ago, and ended 80,000
years ago. During the interval bétween those two
‘dates, the condition of each hemisphere alternated
‘between long cold periods and long hot periods, of
some 10,300 yeats each. During the last cold spell,
all England and Ireland were in the condition of —
Greenland at the present day. The ice had planed
every living thing clean off the face of the country, and
‘we may still trace its scratches on the smooth granite
bosses of Wales and Scotland, or find ‘its till and its
‘moraines on the plains and valleys of. East Anglia
and Derbyshire. Corisequéntly the ancestors of every

58 Flowers and their Pedigrees. —

plant and every animal~now living in Britain must
have come into it after the end of the last-long cold
spell—that is to say, roughly speaking, some 80,000
years since, -- : vey

.. Moreover, when Britain was repeopled after the
great ice age, it must have been united: to the Conti-
nent: somewhere, or else it could: not possibly possess
the large number of European plants .and animals
which it: actually contains! Had-it then been an
island, .jt:might have had a considerable population of
ferns and small-seeded’ flowers, of. birds-and winged
insects, blown over to it from the shores of. France’ or
Holland ; it might even have had a fair sprinkling. of
snails and lizards, or a few small quadrupeds, wafted
across on logs of wood, or carried over accidentally by
various chanees ; but it would be’ quite impossible
that.it should have all the species.of large or middle-
‘sized wild mammals which we see now inhabiting it—
the red deer, the fallow deer, the. otter, the badger,
the.fox, the hare, the rabbit, the weasel, the stoat, the
marten, the hedgehog, the wild cat, the mole, the
shrew, the squirrel, and. the water-vole. Altogether,
we have no less than forty species of British manimals ;
while the bear, the wild boar, the beaver, the reindeer,

1 T owe my acknowledgments in much that follows to Mr. A. R.
-Wal]ice’s admirable work on /sland Life, ~ :

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 59

and the wolf have become extinct within the historical
period ; and the wild white cattle even now survive
sparingly in Chillingham Park and a few other
scattered places. Clearly, as none of these animals
or their ancestors can have been in Britain 80,000
years ago, they.must have come into Britain at some
later ‘date, across a wide bridge of solid land. For
Mr. Wallace has conclusively shown that islands
which have never formed part of a mainland never
have’ any terrestrial mammals at all ; and-that a-very
narrow Strait is quite sufficient to. prevent the passage
of mammals from one island to another.’ ‘The. sound
which’ divides the Indo-Malayan. region from the
‘Australian region is hardly wider ‘than: that, which
separates England.from France; yet not: one: single
Australian mammal has ever reached: the Indo-
Malayan region, and not one single Indian mammal
has ever reached Australia, The kangaroos, wombats,
-phalangers, and cassowaries of the one district are
quite distinct in'type from the elephants, tapirs, tigers,
deer; and monkeys of the other. So that our numer-
ous existing English fauna must certainly have crossed
over on dry land. ’

We may take it for granted, then, that thes mass of
‘British plants came in, fromthe east and south-east,
‘immediately after: the ice of -the glacial -epoch had

60 . Flowers and their Pedigrees.

passed away... For the ice had driven man and beast,
herb and tree, southward before it ; and even if there
was a little fringe of what isnow Southern Britain. not
wholly glaciated, yet its condition must have been
like that of the little habitable fringe in Greenland,
and its plants and animals (if any) must have been of
thoroughly Arctic types, But as.the glaciers cleared
away again, with the return of the sun to the northern
hemisphere after its long cold.cycle, the southern and
eastern plants and animals must have followed: the
- retreating ice-sheet from year to year ; till at last the
species which used to inhabit’ Kent and. the Isle of
Wight found their permanent home in Lapland, and
those which used ‘to. inhabit Greece and Italy found
their . permanent. home. in’ Holland, Denmark, and
Great Britain. a ae .
This sufficiently accounts for the presence in
England and Scotland of the central European and
Scandinavian tlements; but it does not account for
the presencé of my hairy spurge and of all the other
south-western species, belonging to the Pyrenean and
Italian region, “Clearly, the ordinary plants of Eastern
England are plants which once spread uninterruptedly
from Warwickshire to Central Europe, when the belt
of land over the German Ocean was still entire ; and
clearly, too, the ordinary plants of the North and of

ve he Romance of a Wayside Weed. 61

Scotland are plants which once spread uninterruptedly
from Yorkshire to Scandinavia, during the ‘same
period ; while both ‘classes have been afterwards
isolated in Britain by the gradual subsidence of the
intervening land. But this:still leaves unanswered the
question, Whence did we get the Pyrenean types ?
Perhaps one might be disposed at first. sight to
fancy that they came over separately, as we know a
few American plants have really done: There is the
well-known ~ Canadian canal. weed, which was intro-
duced ‘by a botanist into a tank near Cambridge in
1848, and rapidly spread over all England ; there are
a few orchids and other wild flowers whose seeds have
apparently been carried across the Atlantic. on the
“feet of. birds ; and there are some half-dozen escaped
garden flowers, like the evening primrose, which have
establishéd themselves easily among some rare warm
“Spots” in our congenial climate. Possibly. it might
seem as ‘though the arbutus, the hairy spurge, the
_Mediterranean heath, and all the rest of the southern
“species i in South- Western England or Ireland had got
‘across to us in somewhat the same fragmentary
“fashion, and had succeeded in effecting a foothold
“only in these warmer Cornish and Irish nooks. But
“there are a great many reasons against believing this.
“In the first place, we have the immense number to

62) Flowers and their Pedigrees.

account for—at least ninety species, all told ; which
is ‘a prodigious item to set down to the chapter of
accidents,: For the distance from Bordeaux to Kerry
is really 700 miles, while the distance from: Portugal
to the Azores (which are peopled with plants and
animals in the most fragmentary manner) is only 900 ;
and we can hardly suppose that so large a number of
_ southern plants could permanently establish them-
selves (against the prevailing winds) in a country
already occupied by a flourishing native flora. But
two more fatal objections are these: First, our southern
‘plants are only found in the extreme south-west, and
not in the warmest parts of the Isle of Wight, of
‘Kent, or of Hampshire. Even at Bournemouth and
Ventnor we meet with none of them. And secondly,
-they are all evidently dying out; they represent an
‘old flora which is no longer adapted to the country,
not a new flora pushing its way vigorously into regions
-occupied by less congenial plants. Every year they
‘are disappearing before our very eyes, and many of
- them are-from time to time now being expunged from
“our. floras.. The Kilmington. lobelia is getting, rarer
-as..every summer passes ; “the wild asparagus, once
:common on the Lizard promontory, is now only to be
- picked, at the imminent risk_of life and limb, amongst
‘ the crannies of a rocky islet -at Kynance Cove; the

,

The Romance ofa Wayside Weed. 63

‘purple viper’s-bugloss has been driven to the very
extremity of Britain at Penzance ; while the various
kinds of rock-cistus, the Steep Holme peony, and the
Cheddar pink linger on each only in a single inac-
cessible spot.in the south-western peninsula of England.
These are clear evidences that they form the last
stragglers. of a vanquished. flora, not the. vigorous
‘vanguard of a victorious and aggressive race.
And now we are in a ‘position fairly to ‘settle. the
problem where the hairy spurge and its fellows have .
‘come from, and how..they got here. People. who
‘recognise the fact-that Britain was once joined to the
‘Continent are too apt to fancy that it was joined only
by a sort of narrow bridge between.Dover and Calais.
-The aspect of the shore’ on either side, the high bluffs
of Shakespeare’s Cliff and Cap Grisnez, the geological
continuity between the chalk and the other formations
on the two coasts, all forcibly suggest that France
and England must’ once have been joinéd there—
as, indeed, they undoubtedly were. But we are all
inclined mentally to minimise the amount of connec-
tion ; we stick in an isthmus, just sufficient to carry
-the South-Eastern Railway across to Boulogne, and
then ‘we are fully satisfied, with. our new geography.
In reality, however, the old land corinection was gome-
thing far more complete and universal than that.

64 Flowers and ther Pedigrees.

There is every reason to believe that, at the close of

the last glacial epoch, Great Britain and Ireland

formed a part of the Continent, not in the sense in

which Scandinavia or Denmark still does, but in the —
sense in which Bavaria and Switzerland stilldo. The

land of Europe then stretched out to seaward far

beyond Ireland, Spain, and the Farde Islands ; and

Cork, Glasgow, and Liverpool then stood further

inland than Lyons, Munich, and Geneva stand at the

‘present day. ,

_ Walking one morning a few winters since-—just
after the most terrible tempest of recent years—on the
Parade at Hastings, I happened to notice a curiously
shaped flint among the shingle lately thrown up by
the great storm. The waves had beaten right over the
sea-wall, and scattered a litter of wrack and pebbles
along the. whole roadway.. I stooped down and
picked up the odd-looking fragment: to my surprise,
I found. it was a palzolithic implement, a rudely
_chipped flint knife of the older stone age, the relic of
a race compared, with whom even the builders of
~Wansdyke here were men of yesterday. This rude
flake was fashioned by the naked black-fellows who
hynted the rhinoceros and the mammoth in the
English valleys, before ever the great ice age itself

chad spread its glaciers over the length and breadth of

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 65

P

the land, a couple of hundred thousand years since.
Its outer surface was dulled and whitened by age, as -
is always the case with these primeval flint weapons;
but its edge was still sharp and keen, though crusted
in places with a hard film of mineral deposit, and also
_ blunted here and there by use in cutting clubs and
reindeer bones for its savage possessor. But there
were no traces of rolling as in water-worn pebbles :
the knife was freshly disinterred. It was clear that
the storm had just unearthed it from beneath the sub-
merged forest which belts all the coast from Beachy
Head to Dungeness. For the forest is a post-glacial
deposit ; and it once formed part of this great connect-
ing land, now buried beneath the Atlantic, the English
Channel, and the German Ocean. The trees which
composed it still stand as upright stumps, firmly
bedded in a layer of tenacious clay ; and strewn
beneath them lie prostrate boles, in the very place.
where the wind threw them down some fifty or sixty
thousand years ago. In the public garden at Hast-
ings, one of these huge balks, dug up on the St.
Leonard’s beach, has been fixed as a curiosity ; and,
though its outer layer is charred and blackened by the
water, the inner wood is still as sound and as firm as
on the day it fell. We have to deal here with a time

_ which is marvellously ancient indeed. when measured
4

66 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

by our ordinary human and _ historical chronology,
but which is quite modern when judged by the vast
timepiece of cosmical and geological cycles.

All round the coast of England you will find end-
less traces of these submerged forests, especially
wherever the land shelves off slowly to seaward.
That most lively of medizval travellers, Giraldus
Cambrensis (whose amusing and somewhat slangy
diary would be much more read, I am sure, if people
did not incongruously mistake him for a dry chronicler
of the monastic sort), gives a full and really scientific
account of one which he came across in the course
of his Welsh peregrinations ; and ever since his time
the submerged forests have been noted in spot after
spot in every part of Southern Britain. Beginning in
the great bight between Wales and Scotland, they
continue round the coast at Holyhead ; turn up again
in Cardigan Bay ; fringe the whole Bristol Channel ;
fill in the bottom of the fiords at Falmouth, Dart-
mouth, Torquay, and Exmouth; trend round the Isle
of Wight, Selsea, and Pevensey Bay ; appear sparingly
off the Essex coast; and thence run up by Cromer
and the Wash to Holderness and Lindisfarne. They
are everywhere newer than the glacial deposits, and
so they give us a fair ground for believing that a
great general subsidence of the land has taken place

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 67

all round the shore of England at a comparatively
.recent period—that is to say, since the close of the
last glacial epoch. How recent they are is well shown
by the nature of the remains themselves; for they
often contain undecayed leaves, water-logged hazel-
nuts, bits of small twigs, and other forestine rubbish
of a perfectly undecayed and modern-looking charac-
ter. Some of the twigs even break with a sharp
crackling sound, like dry wood freshly taken from a
modern forest.

The question now remains, If the land once thus
extended farther out to sea than at present, how far
out did it extend? or, in other words, how large a
subsidence has taken place? Here we have an
excellent hint for our guidance in the fact that Ireland
must have been united to England since the glacial
epoch, because we find in Ireland a large proportion
of the British plants and animals, including a con--
siderable number of land mammals. Now, how much
must we raise the general land surface of the British
Isles in order to unite Ireland to Great Britain ?
Well, a rise of less than one hundred fathoms would
suffice to join the whole of our islands throughout
nearly all their length, leaving only two large lakes in
the very deepest parts of the sea, where the plummet
marks a depth of a hundred and fifty fathoms. One

68 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

of these two large lakes would lie between Galloway
and Ulster, and the other would fill up the hollow of
the Minch between the Hebrides and the Isle of Skye.

NORTH SEA

1

“TRELA np

Fic. 16.—Sketch Map of Post-Glacial Britain,

But the same amount of elevation would also suffice
to unite us to the Continent from Denmark to Spain,
as well as to push out our whole coast-line about fifty

The Romance of a Wavside Weed. 69

miles to the westward of Cape Clear. Beyond that
distance the sea-bottom suddenly topples over from a
general depth of a hundred fathoms to a depth of a
thousand fathoms or more; which clearly shows that
this line, curving round from Shetland to the Spanish
shore of the Asturias, must mark an old and long-con-
tinued prehistoric land-barrier. In other words, the
British Isles are situated on a comparatively shallow
submarine bank, which spreads north, south, and east
of them, but ends abruptly to the westward’ by a
sudden drop of eight or nine hundred fathoms. If
you were now to raise this bank a hundred fathoms in
height, you would lift its whole area above the sea-
level, save only in the two hollows already noted;
but if you went on raising it for several hundred
fathoms more, you would not materially alter the
coast-line established by your first elevation. So we
can hardly doubt that the hundred-fathom line really
represents the old western boundary of Europe
towards the Atlantic, because it coincides so nearly in
depth with the elevation necessary to unite England
and Ireland to one another, and to the Continent.
Only one element of our problem now remains to
_ be solved ; and that is the question—When did the
subsidence take place which turned the dry land all
round Britain into the beds of the English Channel,

70 Flowers and thetr Pedigrees.

the German Ocean, and the Irish Sea? To this
question I am deferentially inclined to give a some-
what different answer from that of most of our
authorities. As a rule, it seems to be implied that
the subsidence was a single act, spread indeed over a
considerable length of time, but completed once for
all, and never since renewed. It appears to me more
probable, however, that the subsidence has been going
on more or less ever since the age of the submerged
forests, and that it still continues in places over the
same area, Mr. Wallace has already pointed out that
Ireland was probably separated from the mainland
sooner than England, because it has fewer native
mammals and hardly any reptiles or amphibians.
The happy immunity from toads and serpents which
is generally attributed to the pious exertions of St.
Patrick, may perhaps rather be set down to the early
isolation of Ireland from the mainland shortly after
the end of tHe great ice age, and before all the
members of the new European fauna had had time to
spread equally over the more outlying portions of the
yet undivided continent. But there are other indica-
tions of subsequent partial submergence elsewhere.
Many facts lead me to the belief that the Bristol
Channel was still a’plain through which the Severn
flowed quietly to the sea long after the final insulation

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 71

of Ireland and the Hebrides. Tourists driving from
Barmouth to Port Madoc have looked down from the
picturesque escarpment of Harlech Castle upon a
narrow belt of plain between the mountains and the
sea, and have been told how the Lowland Hundred
once stretched outward from this point across Cardi-
gan Bay as.far as Sarn Badrig or St. Patrick’s
Causeway, a rocky reef which whitens the Channel
into a long line of breakers in the middle distance.
Welsh legends, immortalised by Peacock’s delicious
satire, tell us how the Hundred was submerged by an
inundation ; and the tradition as to this subsidence is
almost certainly correct. There is some ground for
believing that the Isle of Wight was still united at
ebb tide to the mainland of Hampshire by a sandy
isthmus, when the Romans built their villas at-
Brading ; and we know that even as late as the days
when Hengest and Horsa launched their mythical
long ships for the conquest of Kent, the Zuyder Zee
was yet undoubtedly an inland lake, separated from
the German Ocean by a long belt of land now almost
. entirely submerged, save in the solitary line of islands
which preserves the outline cf its northern shore.
Nay, even in our own time, the southern part of
Sweden is slowly sinking by inches beneath the level
of the Baltic. Hence I am strongly inclined to sus-

72 Flowers and their Pedigrees. .

pect that the submergence of this western land was a
work of time, and that no particular date can be
assigned to it as a whole.

Now, when a continuous belt of lowland stretched
round from Spain to Ireland and the Shetlands, we
can casily understand that the warm type of south
European plants would run northward along its
western shore as far as the climatic conditions per-
mitted. But the climate on all the west coast of
northern Europe is exceptionally mild and moist,
through the agency of the Gulf Stream and the warm
westerly breezes which blow across it. Hence it is
not surprising that the Mediterranean heath, the
strawberry tree, the pzony, the hairy spurge, and all
the other southern plants which I have before
scheduled, should have ranged all along the Atlantic
shore of Europe, past the Pyrenees and the Asturias,
up the bend a hundred and fifty miles west of the
Land’s End, and so onward to Kerry and Connemara.
Dr. James Geikie has recently shown good reasons
for believing that the last glacial epoch was imme-
diately succeeded by a short spell—say a thousand
years or so—of very sunny and genial conditions in
northern Europe; and while these favourable con-
ditions lasted we can readily understand that the
southern flora may even have extended along the

The Romance of a Wayside Wied. 73,

‘Sheltered belt beneath the mountain-ranges of Ireland
and Scotland as far northward as Bute and Arran,
where some few of its hardier representatives are
actually still preserved. Meanwhile, the eastern level
slope of what is now England, together with Holland
and the intervening land which then filled up the
basin of the German Ocean, must have had an inland
continental climate, exposed to the full rigour of the
north-east winds, and unmitigated by the warmth and
moisture now diffused over it by the sea and its
currents. In short, the condition of that great table-
land must have been much like the condition of
Central Russia at the present day, aggravated perhaps
by an extra elevation to some hundreds of feet above
its existing level. Here, then, the flora must have
been of the central European and Scandinavian type ;
while west of the great central range of England, the
trees and flowers must in the main have resembled
those which we now find among the nooks of the
Apennines and the Genoese Riviera.

By-and-by, however, the earth’s crust began to
sink in western Europe, as it is sinking now in Scania
and the bed of the southern Baltic. Slowly the
great Atlantic plain disappeared below the waters,
leaving only the mountain-tops and higher plateaus
as islands above the sea-level. First the two lateral

74 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

valleys of the old lake-system were flooded, cutting
off Ireland and the western Hebrides as two large
and compact islands, considerably bigger than they
now remain at the present day. Then, doubtless,
the North Sea and the Channel were overflowed,
leaving only a narrow neck of chalk downs as a
connecting link between Kent and Picardy, which
the waves gradually beat down and at last destroyed
The cliffs of Dover and Cap Blancnez, of Beachy
Head and Dieppe, now mark its limits. Still the
Bristol Channel remained an open valley, and Scilly
was united to the Cornish peninsula. Next, Scilly
and the Channel Islands went; while the Hebrides
and the western coast of Scotland broke up into a
number of separate islets, only the granite crests of
the higher mountain-ranges now overtopping the
water in long lines, while the lateral valleys became’
the straits which separate the various members of the
different archifelagos from their nearest neighbours.
Any one who has once yachted down the broken
ridge of the Outer Hebrides cannot fail to have
noticed that they seem but the summits of a vast
sunken range, jagged and beaten at the outer edge by
the ceaseless dash of the Atlantic. Last of all,
appareritly, went Anglesey, Wight, and the coastwise
eyots, as well as the Bristol Channel. On the pro-

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 75

tected eastern shore of Britain generally, the low
slopes have survived well enough, and patches of
shingle and sand, like the Dogger Bank, stil] mark
the position of the higher sunken lands; but on the
west and north the open Atlantic has eaten away all
but the most sheltered plains, and cut its way at all
exposed points into the heart of the hills, giving rise
to the magnificent cliff scenery of Cornwall, Kerry,
and the western Highlands. If you stand upon the
shore of Coboe Bay in Guernsey, and look at low tide
across the vast floor of jagged and water-fretted
granite rocks which line its bottom, you will see with
what force the waves have wormed their way over all
the lowland ; and they will only halt wiien they have
planed down the whole of the island, as they have
already planed down the lesser. land which once
stretched out to northward beyond the solitary pinna-
cles of the Casquets.

When all these changes had taken place, the stray
members of the southern flora in Cornwall, Devon,
Kerry, and Connemara would find themselves quite
cut off from their fellows in the Mediterranean, the
Pyrenees, and the Asturias. For the water has eaten
away almost ali the plain of the Bay of Biscay, save
only a comparatively insignificant angle between the
Loire, the mountains of Auvergne, and the roots of the

76. Flowers and their Pedigrees.

Pyrenees ; and it has left the high and bleak granite
moorland of Brittany jutting out alone into the
western sea. But Brittany looks northward, and is
open only to the chilliest winds ; while its fair share
of the Gulf Stream is diverted by currents due to the
ay of the land in Cornwall. Moreover, the great ‘
bight of Biscay distracts and upsets the old run of
the water, so that the whole shore of France from the
Garonne northward is really colder and less equable
in temperature than Cornwall and Kerry, or even
than the average of our own western and southern
coast. The Vendée is a chilly marshland ; Bretagne
Bretonannte is a high and wind-swept heath. On
the other hand, our extreme south-western peninsulas
and islands are bathed on every side by the warm
water of the Gulf Stream, and so possess an unusually
mild, damp, and equable climate. Every one has
heard of the semi-tropical vegetation of palms and
aloes which floufishes in the open air at Tresco Abbey
in the Scilly Isles. Here, then, we have exactly the
conditions under which the southern plants, though
beaten back to the very base of the hills, might still
manage to keep up a precarious existence in a few
scattered and sheltered nooks. And that is exactly
what they have done. Separated from all the rest of
their kind, exposed to occasional hard winters or

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 74

heavy frosts, and slowly dying out under our very
eyes, they have yet left here and there a few isolated
descendants to tell the story of their origin and their
failure.. Curiously enough, these little lingering colo-
nies of Mediterranean plants exist only on the southern
and western slopes, among the cliffs and combes and
bays which face and overlook the submerged lands
whence their ancestors were driven by the advancing
sea. So oddly do they confine themselves to the
islands and the most insular peninsulas that their
geographical distribution almost looks like a precon-
certed arrangement.

. Thus we may observe once more that one little
islet of the Bristol Channel alone preserves the red
peony. Holyhead . Island has half a dozen rare
species. The Jersey centaury, Pelisser’s linaria, and
several other southera flowers have died out every-
where save in the Channel Islands. Scilly shares
with them in the sand bird’s foot. The Irish Arran
and other Irish islands have many peculiar species ;
and a few southern types even reach Bute and the
western Highlands ; for, as every one knows, Rothesay
has a climate almost as warm as Torquay. So, too,
with the peninsulas. The Lizard, with the most
equable temperature on the English coast, is a perfect
mine of wealth to the botanist. It has three peculiar

78 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

southern clovers, and lots of other rarities. Penzance,
at the very horn of Cornwall, has five or six speciali-
ties. The position of Kerry gives it a climate like
that of Finisterre, with the appropriate flora. Wild
madder belongs: only to a few headlands of Pem-
brokeshire, the Damnonian peninsula, and the south-
west of Ireland. Torquay, on the promentory of
Hope’s Nose, shares a southern buplever with the
Channel Islands. Babbicombe has a species almost
to itself. Corfe Castle, in the so-called Isle of Pur-
beck in Dorset, divides a Spanish heather with Corn- —
wall and the West of Ireland. One kind of rest-
harrow, after getting up from the Pyrenees as far as
the Channel Islands, then positively takes a second
spring to the Mull of Galloway. As to the number
of Mediterranean plants which are found in Britain
only in Devon and Cornwall, or in Kerry and Conne-
mara, or in both, I spare you the recital of them.
Even the moré inland and moorland types, which
each survive on one high common alone, answer to
the same law; for they occur on the warmest moors,
in the neighbourhood of the sunniest south-western
slopes. Thus the Cheddar pink grows in a single
basking hollow heated by radiation from two great
walls of limestone rock upon the western flanks
of Mendip; the purple lobelia loiters on a bright

The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 79

upland near the warm valley of the Devonshire Axe ;
the white sedum struggles on upon the edge of Mal-
vern ; and my hairy wood-spurge here battles hard
for life on Claverton Down, close to the steaming
basin of the old Roman Thermz at Bath.

And so I end where I began. My sermon has
led me far afield ; but, like a good preacher, I have
come back to my text. I have only touched lightly
upon the simplest and least technical proofs ; but
when the whole evidence is put together—as I do not
pretend to put it together off-hand, sitting here cross-
legged on the edge of Wansdyke—there can be very
little reasonable doubt that this is something like the
way in which the hairy wood-spurge first found its
way to the Prior Park Lane. So I have gathered my
little morsel tenderly and carefully, not injuring the
little plant more than I can help by my clumsiness ;
and I hope all future botanisers will do the same, in
order to aid in preserving and handing down to after
ages this interesting fragment of old English history,
kept green and vital for us all in the tiny blossom of
a wayside weed.

80 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

III.
STRAWBERRIES.

SIDE by side in our English hedgerows in early
springtime there grow two sister plants, almost exactly
alike in foliage, flower, and all other points except the
fruit, but differing widely from one another in that
solitary, and to us essential, particular, One of these
plants is the wild strawberry, the other is the little
three leaved, white potentilla. It is not often that a
' parent species and its more developed offspring sur-
vive together in the same district, but this is almost
certainly the case with these two small English way-
side flowers. Indeed, the similarity between them is
so close that even the most unobservant passers-by
have been greatly struck with it; and the common
native English name of the white potentilla—‘ barren
strawberry ’"—bears witness to the striking character
of the family likeness. Perhaps one ought rather to
go a step further, and to say that, while the most
unobservant have perceived the relationship, only the
more observant have ever discovered the distinctness

Strawberrtes. 8I

of the two plants. Nothing is more ordinary than to
hear casual townsfolk exclaim that though there were
lots of strawberry blossoms a little while ago in such-
and-such a spot, there are no ripe strawberries to be

Fic. 17.—The Wild Strawberry.

seen now that the time has come for picking the
fruit. In such cases, careful examination will gener-
ally show that the spot is really covered by white
potentilla plants, whose little starry flowers were
easily mistaken by the world at large for true straw-

82 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

berry blossom. Though there are some marked dis-
tinctive features even in the flower, to which I shall
presently recur, it is in the fruit alone that the two
plants really differ sufficiently to attract the attention
of an unbotanical eye. But here the difference is one
which touches humanity on a very keen point indeed,
for the strawberry blossom sets at last into a sweet
and pulpy berry, while the potentilla blossom sets
only into a small head of dry and unpalatable nutlets.
How the edible fruit has developed from the inedible
seeds is the question which I propose briefly to in-
vestigate in the present paper.

To get properly at the ancestry of the strawberry,
we ought first to begin with the potentillas at large,
for a most important part of our evidence consists in
the fact that the white potentilla varies from the
central type. of its race in nearly all the same par-
ticulars as the strawberry plant. In other words, we
have to show®that the ancestors of the strawberry had
already acquired most of their existing peculiarities
while they were still white potentillas, and that they
have only then varied so far as to have added to that
white potentilla type the one extra peculiarity of a
red and juicy berry. Our systematic botanists, indeed,
will tell us that while the one plant belongs to the
genus Potentilla, the other plant belongs to the

Strawberries. 83

totally distinct genus Fragaria; and they imply,
therefore, that the differences between the real straw-
berry and the barren strawberry are far greater than
the differences between the barren strawberry and the
other potentillas. I hope in the sequel to show, how-
ever, that it would be far easier to develop a straw-
‘berry out of a white potentilla than to develop a
white potentilla itself out of any one among its yellow
allies ; and therefore that the systematic classification
is a faulty one, and the popular classification a
correct stroke of half-unconscious scientific intuition.
The potentillas are a group of very lowly and
primitive roses, the earliest and simplest surviving
members of the great and world-wide rose family.
Our common English cinquefoil may be accepted as
a good typical instance of the whole group. Cinque-
foil is a pretty tufted creeping plant, whose small
golden flowers, like yellow roses in miniature, star the
waste grass-plots by the sides of lanes and highways
everywhere in Britain during the summer and autumn
months. Its leaves, as the very name denotes, con-
sist of five separate spreading leaflets, all springing
from a common point, and radiating round it as a
centre like the fingers of a hand. The flowers, as
usual in most very simple and primitive plants are
bright golden yellow, and they closely resemble the

84 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

equally early blossoms of the buttercup, which simi-
larly form the starting point of another great and
varied family. Originally, there is good reason for
believing, all flowers were of this same bright golden
yellow hue; and thosé of them that have since pro-
gressed to other colours, under stress of special insect
selection, have passed through regular gradations of
white, pink, red, crimson, purple, and finally blue.
Some flowers still remain at the ancestral yellow
stage; others have got on as far as white or pink;
yet others have attained the stage of crimson or
purple ; and a very few, the most advanced of all,
have even reached the culminating glory of deep
blue.

We have several other yellow potentillas in
‘England besides the cinquefoil, and some of these
have varied a good deal in foliage or other points
from the central form. Nearest of all to it stands the
small tormenfil, so frequent upon heaths or other
moors and uplands; for the main distinction between
them lies in the fact that the cinquefoil has usually
five large petals, while the tormentil has usually only |
four. This difference, however, is by no means always
constant, for on the one hand it is easy to find stray
flowers of cinquefoil with only four petals, while on
the other hand the first flower on each stalk of tor-

Strawberries, 85

mentil has only five. There is an intermediate form,
‘too, which exactly splits the difference between the
two plants in every respect; and one can hardly
doubt that tormentil is in reality only a very slightly
altered form of cinquefoil, grown woodier and more
dwarfish from its peculiar upland situation, and with
one of its petals suppressed through gradual failure of
constitutional vigour. The frequency with which the
first flower on each stem recurs to the original five-
petalled form, while the material to spare remains
abundant, is very significant : the later flowers, as the
material for their formation runs short, have generally
to be content with only four petals each.

More divergent types of potentilla than these are
the forms which have their leaves (to use the technical
term) pinnately, not digitately, divided—that is to say,
with the separate leaflets arranged along two sides of
a central leaf-stalk instead of radiating from a common
point ; and though the white potentilla and the straw-
berry belong rather to the latter or digitate division,
I shall yet enter briefly into the nature of the pinnate |
section, for the sake of the light which it throws by
analogy upon the evolution of our own proper subject,
Commonest among the potentillas of this divergent
group in northern Europe is the trailing silverweed or
gooseweed of our English roadsides, a pretty, long-

86 Flowers and thetyr Pedigrees.

leaved plant, with a silvery underside, and bright
golden flowers springing from rooted joints on its
creeping runners. A rarer plant is the shrubby
potentilla, which grows in bushy or stony places,
especially on mountain sides, and has accommodated
itself to its special situation by acquiring a_stout
woody stem. This species also has a ycllow flower.
But there are two other pinnate-leaved English
potentillas whose blossoms have long since changed
colour under the selective influence of their insect
fertilisers. One of these is the marshy comarum, a
perennial which grows in peaty or boggy places, and
has assumed a dingy purplish-yellow hue, to suit the
eyes of marshland insects. It is very noticeable that
waterside flies do not seem to care for yellow, and
most waterside flowers are therefore pinkish, purplish,
or white. Thus the water-crowfoot and the mud-
haunting ivy-leaved crowfoot have become white,
while all our dther native buttercups remain yellow.
In the group of bennets or Geums, closely allied to
the potentillas, we find a still closer analogy, for the
roadside herb-bennet or common avens is yellow like
cinquefoil, but the marshy water-avens has exactly the
‘same dusky purplish-yellow tint as the marshy coma-
rum. The other pinnate English potentilla, found
wild with us only among the clefts of the Breiddin

Strawberries. 87

Hills in Montgomeryshire, is a mountain species with
handsome and conspicuous white blossoms ; and this
also is in striking analogy with similar facts elsewhere,
for mountain species usually rise higher than their
neighbours in the scale of colour, owing to the keen
competition between the flowers for the visits of those
rare fertilisers, the butterflies, which sail further up
mountain heights than the bees and other meadow
honeysuckers. For example, some Alpine buttercups
are snowy-white, while most of their lowland congeners
are simply yellow.

With the side light thus cast upon our subject by
the analogy of the pinnate potentillas, let us hark
back to the digitate cinquefoil once more, and ask by
what steps some such early ancestral form gave origin
to the common predecessor of the true strawberry and
its barren sister. The cinquefoil, we saw, had five leaf-
lets to each leaf, but the strawberry and the white
potentilla have three only. This is one of the marked
points wherein these two plants differ from the other
potentillas, and agree with one another. But though
the trefoil leaf is a matter of some importance, as
indicating community of origin, it is not difficult to
understand how it has been developed from the primi-
tive cinquefoil. The exact number of leaflets in a leaf
is always rather variable, depending partly on the

88 Flowers and. their Pedigrees.

mode of growth of the plant, and partly on the
amount of available material. Thus, in the allied
tormentil the lower leaves have five leaflets, but the
upper ones have usually three only. In the spring
potentilla, a rare English species, the lower leaves
have seven or five, and the upper ones five or three.
Again, where a species creeps along the ground, it is
apt to have long pinnate leaves with many leaflets, as
happens, for example, with silverweed and many
similar plants. But where the leaves grow habitually
among tall grass or choking wayside weeds, the
number of leaflets is very apt to be reduced to three,
as happens, for example, with clover and lotus among
the peaflower tribe, and with wood-sorrel among the
geranium tribe, many of whose allies have long pin-
nate leaves with numerous leaflets. Now, the straw-
berry and the barren strawberry differ conspicuously
in habitat from the other potentillas in the fact that
they grow mafnly among grass, on banks, or in hedge-
row thickets. Hence it suits them best to raise their
trefoil leaves on tall stalks above the neighbouring
herbage, and thus to get at the light and air which
they require for their proper growth. Natural selec-
tion has easily brought about this result, because in.
such situations those potentillas which raised their
leaves highest would best survive, while those which

Strawberrics. 89

trailed or crept closely along the ground would soon
be starved out for want of carbonic acid (the raw
material of growth) by their surrounding competitors.

In another direction the ancestors of the straw-
berry and of the barren strawberry also diverged from
their cinquefoil predecessors, and that was in the |
peculiar colour of their flowers. For some reason
rather difficult to decide, the petals have changed
from yellow to white. Difficult to decide, I say, be-

Fic. 18. FIG. 19.

Flower of Wild Strawberry. Flower of White Potentilla.
cause we do not exactly know what are the insects
which the strawberries set themselves out especially to
please or what is the peculiar nature of their specific
taste. But,asa rule, this change from yellow to white
petals is an ordinary concomitant of higher develop-
ment, and it probably accompanies some change in
the insects to which fertilisation is generally due.
Our own native species have got no further in the
upward course of development than white ; but two

5

90 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

allied East Indian forms with digitate leaves, cultiv-
ated in our flower-gardens, the Nepaul potentilla and
the purple potentilla, have risen as far in the scale of
coloration as crimson and deep red.

One may sum up the common points of the
strawberry and the barren strawberry somewhat as
follows: Both have tall leaves of three leaflets, raised
on an elevated leaf-stalk, whereas most of their other
congeners have many leaflets. Both have white

FIG. 20. -Fic. 21.
Fruit of Wild Strawberry. Fruit of White Potentilla.

flowers, whereas most of their other congeners have
them yellow.* Both have short tufted stems ; in both
the leaves are clothed with silky down; and in both
the leaflets are regularly toothed at the edge in the
self-same manner. On the other hand, they differ
from one another almost exclusively in the matter of
their fruit. Now, as we shall proceed to see, it is com-
paratively easy to produce the change whereby a dry
fruit becomes a succulent one, and it is also compara-

Strawberries. gI

tively easy to produce any one single change unac-
companied by others ; but it is comparatively difficult
to produce the whole set of changes whereby the two
strawberries differ alike from all their congeners. So,
if we are going to make a new genus, Fragaria, with
a Latin name at all, we ought to make it include both
' the true strawberry and the barren strawberry, while
we relegate to the genus Po/entil/a all the other less
closely related kinds. But perhaps we shall do better
if we lump them all together in a single genus, con-
‘sidering that, after all, the barren strawberry does not
differ more from the remainder of the potentillas than
many of these differ from one another among them-
selves.

And now, how did the edible strawberry get
developed from its barren ally? Well, if we take the
fruit of any potentilla, we shall find that it consists of
several small, dry, one-seeded nuts, so tiny that they
look themselves like seeds, crowded on a thick recep-
tacle or flower stalk, without any signs of redness or
succulence. In some potentillas, however, as the fruit
ripens, this receptacle becomes a little spongy, some-
thing like the hull of a raspberry, only without its pulpy
character. It is a common tendency of fruits to de-
velop such pulpiness, and sometimes they do so quite
suddenly by apparently spontaneous variation, as when

92 Flowers and thetr Pedigrees.

an almond tree has been known to produce peach-like
fruits. But no fruit will permanently acquire such a
succulent character unless it derives some benefit by
doing so: the change, once set up, will only be per-
petuated by natural selection if it proves of advantage
to the plants which happen to display it. Has it done
so in the case of the strawberry ?

A strawberry, as’ we all know, consists of a swollen
red receptacle or end of the flower-stalk, dotted over
with little seed-like nuts, which answer to the tiny dry
fruits of the potentilla. Suppose any ancestral poten-
tilla ever to have shown any marked tendency towards
fleshiness in the berry, what would happen? It
would probably be eaten by small hedgerow birds,
who would swallow and digest the pulp, but would
not digest the seed-like nuts embedded in its midst.
Hence the nuts would get carried about from place to
place and dropped by the birds in hedgerows or woods,
under circumsfances admirably adapted for their
proper germination. Supposing this to happen often,
the juiciest berries would get most frequently eaten,
and so would produce hearty young plants oftener
than those among their neighbours which simply
trusted to dropping off casually among the herbage.
Again, the birds like sweetness as well as pulpiness,
and those berries which grew most full of sugary

Strawberries. 93

juices would be most likely to attract their attention.
Once more, the brightest coloured fruits would be
most easily seen among the tall foliage of the hedge-
rows, and so those berries which showed any tendency
towards redness of flesh would be sure to gain a point
in attractiveness over their greener rivals. Thus at
last the strawberry has grown into the fruit that we
know so well, by constant unconscious selection of
the little hedgerow birds, exerted at once in favour of
the pulpiest, the sweetest, and the ruddiest berries.

It is noticeable, too, that in all these particulars
what happens to the strawberry happens also in a
hundred other independent cases. Wherever animals
are to be enticed by plants, sugar is sure to be de-
velcped to entice them. It is so developed in the
honey of flowers, in the extra-floral nectaries used for
attracting ants, and in the sweet secretion by which
the pitcher plants allure flies into their murderous
vessels. So, too, bright colour is commonly employed
to advertise the sweet matcrial,as in the petals of
flowers, the skin of fruits, and the pink or purple
patches on the lips of the pitcher plants. On the
other hand, the particular way in which these allure-
ments are displayed by the strawberry is very dif-
ferent from that adopted by almost all other fruits.
In the closely allicd raspberry, the pulpiness and

94 Flowers and ther Pedigrees.

colour are produced in the outer coat of the little nut-
lets themselves, and the receptacle assumes the form
of the hull, which we pull out of the fruit and throw
away. In the plum, there is only one such berry,
inclosing a single seed. But in the strawberry, the
separate fruits remain always hard and dry, and it is
only the receptacle which holds them that swells out
into the bright-coloured and juicy edible portion.

It very seldom happens, however, that a plant
which has diverged from another in one point remains
constant in all other points. In the strawberry this
is almost the case, for it hardly differs at all in any
particular, save its fruit, from its ancestor, the white
potentilla ; and that is good evidence, it seems to me,
that the two plants cannot very long have separated
from one another. Yet even here there are a few
inconspicuous lateral differences. Most notable of
these are the variations in the flower. Though toa
casual observefthe two blossoms look almost identical,
and the plants can only readily be identified when in
fruit, a botanical eye has never any difficulty in‘ dis-
tinguishing the one from the other. The petals of the
barren strawberry are usually short and narrow, the
flowers scarcely open into more than a cup shape,
and there is a good deal of yellowish or reddish
colour about the receptacle and the base of the

Strawberries. 95

stamens. In the true wild strawberry, on the other
hand, the petals are usually larger, rounder, and purer
white, the flowers open into a wide saucer shape, and
there is no yellow or red in the centre of the blossom.
“Perhaps one may best account for these changes by
supposing that the true strawberry has still further pro-
gressed in insect fertilisation. This would sufficiently
explain the purer white of the petals and the loss of
such relics of the primitive yellow hue as still re-
mained in the barren strawberry. But it is also pro-
bable, I think, that the barren strawberries represent
the remnants of the old ancestral race which have
not yet been lived down by the newer strawberry
type, but which are gradually undergoing progressive
degradation ; hence their half-opened flowers—often
self-fertilised—their smaller and degenerate petals,
and their general unattractiveness of outward appear-
ance. It is difficult to compare the blossom of a true
wild strawberry with that of a barren strawberry with-_
out immediately catching the obvious suggestion that
the one is going upward towards higher development
and the other downward towards general degeneracy.
In some other respects the strawberry plant
equally shows itself the nobler species of the two.
Its leaves are usually larger and more erect, its stem
taller and straighter, its root-stock less fluffy and .

96 flowers and their Pedigrees.

not so creeping. Moreover, if it really descended
from the white potentilla, or from some closely allied
common ancestor, it has certainly far outstripped its
progenitor in the race for the possession of the
world, for the white potentilla, or barren strawberry,”
is apparently a strictly European species, found from
Sweden and Ireland to the Crimea and the Caucasus,
but the true strawberry is a much more cosmopolitan
plant, being found in almost all the temperate regions
of the world, from Siberia and Scotland to Van-
couver’s Land, and from the Arctic Regions to the
Andes of Chili. This is quite what one would expect
under the circumstances ; for while the seed-like fruits
of the white potentilla could only fall on the ground
close to the mother plant, and so could disperse
themselves very slowly over a single continent, the
little nuts of the strawberry could be carried by birds
from land to land, across the severing ocean or the
' intervening tropical region. Thus the old degenerate
type is now apparently dying out in northern and
western Europe ; but the progressive and advancing
strawberry is making its way steadily, like a colon-
ising race, round the entire girdle of the two tem-
perate regions.

The strawberries are, as yet, it would seem, a
relatively new race, and so they have not, so far,

Strawberries. 97

split up into any very marked or distinctive separate
species. Still they have even now assumed several
minor forms, worthy at least to be distinguished as
nameable varieties. The most divergent of these, as
might be expected, is the Chilian pine strawberry, for
in the southern hemisphere the imported strawberry,
carried over at first, no doubt, by some weather-
driven bird, has found itself in the midst of a very
different environment from that which surrounds it in
the hedgerows and meadows of its European home :
and to this environment it has had to adapt itself in
several minor but obvious particulars. An almost
equally distinct variety is the white Alpine straw-
berry, which’ has quite lost the native blushing rud-
diness of the lowland fruit. Curiously different in
another way is the hautboy, a taller plant, with fewer
and larger blossoms and a richer flavour, chiefly dis-
tinguished by the separation of its sexes on distinct
plants, for here the stamens grow on one vine, and the
pistils, or embryo fruits, on another. In order to
make the berries swell and ripen, it is necessary to
plant both sorts together, and then the fertilising
insects unconsciously carry the pollen from the stamin-
ate flowers to the sensitive surface of their pistillate
neighbours, and so assist the efforts of the gardener
in setting the fruit. In the great American market

98 Flowers and their Pedzgrees.

gardens it is usual to plant one row of ‘barren’
flowers for every three rows of ‘fertile’ ones, leaving
the insects to do the rest. At present none of these
varieties can be said to have developed into what old-
fashioned botanists used to call ‘a good species,’ for
fertile cross-breeds can still be readily produced
between them all by artificially fertilising the pistils
of one sort with pollen taken on a camel’s-hair brush
from the stamens of another. The possibility of
fertile hybridisation in such a manner shows that the
plants have not long diverged from the common
central stock. But after they have long been exposed
to varying circumstances and acted upon by natural
selection, they will probably become so different from
one another in a variety of small particulars that the
hybrids will no longer prove fertile, owing to the want
of sufficient similarity between the respective ancestral
lines. Perfect fertility is only possible between indi-
viduals which &till retain all the principal traits of a
common ancestral form. Curiously enough, one ex-
isting variety, the Himalayan strawberry, has actually
reverted to the primitive yellow flowers of its cinquefoil
allies.

On the other hand, if the strawbcrries ever really
live down the white potentillas, so that the latter race
dies out altogether, then the distance between the

Strawberrtes. 99

genus Fragaria and the genus Potentilla will be far
greater than it is at the present day. We are lucky
enough at this moment to be able to trace the close
connection between one rather abnormal potentilla
(the barren strawberry) and the true strawberry itself.
But if the barren strawberry and the Himalayan kind
were to disappear we should have no link between
the yellow-flowered, five-leaved, dry-fruited cinquefoil
and the white-flowered, three-leaved, succulent-fruited
strawberry. In nature, as it now stands, the ‘ missing
link’ is fortunately not yet missing. Though still
essentially a potentilla in all important points, it yet
approaches so nearly to the true strawberry that only
rather close observation enables us to perceive their
differences in certain stages of their existence. What
thus happens now with the strawberry has doubtless
happened at one time or another with every new
species of plant or animal ; but the special interest
of this case consists in the fact that. here, in all pro-
bability, we still have the parent type living on in a
degraded form side by side with its more advanced
and developed descendant.

100 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

IV.
CLEAVERS:'

SITTING here on the gate that leads into the Fore Acre,
I have just disentangled from my nether integuments a
long trailing spray of clinging gocse-grass, which has
fastened itself to my legs by the innumerable little
prickly hooks that line the angles of its four-cornered
stem. It is well forward for the time of year, thanks
to our wonderfully mild and genial winter ; for it is
already thickly covered with its tiny white star-shaped
flowers, which have even set here and theré into the
final mature stage of smal! burr-like fruits. Goose-
grass, or cleavers, as we ordinarily call it, is one of the
very commonest among English weeds, and yet I
dare say you never even heard its name till I told it
to you just now; for it is an inconspicuous, petty
sort of plant, which would never gain any attention
at all if it were not for its rough clinging leaves, that |
catch one’s fingers slightly when drawn through them,

1 A lecture delivered at the London Institution, Finskury Circus.

Cleavers. 101

and often obtrude themselves casually upon one’s
notice by looping themselves in graceful festoons
about one’s person. Now I am glad to have got you
button-holed here upon the gate, because I can tell
you all about the goose-grass as we sit on the top bar

Fic. 22.—Goose-grass or Cleavers.

without risk of interruption ; and I dare say you will
be quite surprised to learn that a very interesting and
historical plant it is after all, in spite of its uninviting
external aspect. You will find that its prickly leaves
its square stem, its white flowers, and its odd little

102 Flowers and their Peaigrecs.

fruit all tell us some curious incident in its past evolu-
tion, and are full of suggestiveness as to the general
course of plant development. Here is our weed in
abundance, growing all along the hedgerow by our
side, and clambering for yards from its root over all
the bushes and shrubs in the thicket. Pick a piece
for yourself before I begin, and then you can follow
my preaching at your leisure, with the text always
open before you for reference and verification.

Of course goose-grass had not always all its pre-
sent marked peculiarities. Like every other living
thing, it has acquired its existing shape by slow
modification from a thousand widely different ances-
tral forms. -One of the best ways to discover certain
lost links in the pedigree of plants or animals is to
watch the development of an individual specimen
from the seed or the egg ; for the individual, we have
all often been told, to some extent recapitulates in itself
the whole past history of its race. Thus the cater-
pillar shows us an early ancestral form of the butter-
fly, while it was still a wingless grub ; and the tadpole
shows us an early ancestral form of the frog, while it was
still a limbless mud fish. So, too, the chick hatching
within the shell goes through stages analogous to
those of the fish, the amphibian, the reptile, and the
bird successively. In just the same way young plants

Cleavers. 103

pass through a first simple shape which helps us to
picture to ourselves what they once were—what, for
example, the ancestors of the goose-grass looked like,
long before they were goose-grasses at all. ‘Now here
in my hand I have got a young speci-
men in its very earliest stage, which ~
closely reproduces the primitive type
of its first progenitors, a million ages
since. Goose-grass is an annual weed :
it dies down utterly every autumn,
and only reproduces itself by seed
in the succeeding spring; but this

year the weather has been so excep-
tionally warm and summerlike that

Fic. 23.
thousands of young plants have Seedling of Cleavers.

sprouted from the seed ever since Christmas; and
among them is the specimen which I have just
picked, and which you may have for examination if
you will take the trouble. Look into it, and you
will see that its two first leaves are quite unlike
the upper ones—a phenomenon which: frequently
occurs in seedling plants, and with which you are
probably familiar in the case of the pea and of the
garden bean. But this difference is always a differ-
ence in one direction only; the first leaves which
come out of the seed are invariably simpler in shape

104 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

and type than all the other leaves which come after
them. In the language of science they are less
specialised ; they represent an earlier and undevel-
oped form of leaf—nature’s rough sketch, so to speak,
while the later foliage represents the final improve-
ments introduced with time, and perfected by the
action of natural selection.

These large oval leaves which you see in the
seedling are mere general models or central ideas of
what a leaf should be; they are quite unadapted to
any one special or definite situation. They are not
divided into many little separate leaflets, or prolonged
into points and angles, or gracefully vandyked round
the edges, or beautifully cut out into lacelike patterns,
or armed at every rib with stout defensive prickles,
like many other leaves that you know familiarly.
Their outline is quite simple and unbroken ; they
preserve for us still the extremely plain ancestral
form from whéch such different leaves as those of the
horse-chestnut, the oak, the clover, the milfoil, the
parsley, and the holly are ultimately derived. An
expanded oval, something like this, is the prime
original, the central point from which every variety of
foliage first set out, and from which they have all
diverged in various directions, according as different
circumstances favoured or checked their development

Cleavers. 105

in this, that, or the other particular. Just as a single
little cartilaginous mud-haunter—a blind and skulking
small creature, something like a lancelet, something
like a tadpole, and something like the famous ascidian
larva—has gradually evolved, through diverse lines,
all the existing races of beasts, birds, reptiles, and
fishes, so too a single little primzval plant, something
like these two lowest leaves of the goose-grass, has
gradually evolved all the oaks and elms and ashes;
all the roses, and geraniums, and carnations; all the
cabbages, and melons, and apples, which we ‘see in
the world around us at the present day. And, again,
just as the larval form of the ascidian and of the frog
still preserves for us a general idea of that earliest
ancestral vertebrate, so too these larval leaves of the
goose-grass, if I may venture so to describe them,
still preserve for us a general idea of that earliest
dicotyledonous plant.

Dicotyledonous is a very ugly word, and I shall
not stop now to explain it from the top of a five-
barred gate. It must suffice if I tell you confidenti-
ally that the little plant we have ideally reconstructed
was the first ancestor of almost all the forest trees,
and of all the best known English herbs and flowers ;
but not of the lilies, the ‘grasses, and the cereal
kinds, which belong to the opposite or monocotyle-

106 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

donous division of flowering plants. When this sprig
of goose-grass first appeared above the ground, it pro-
bably represented that typical ancestor almost to the
life ; for it had then only the two rounded leaves you
sec at its base, and none of these six-rowed upper
whorls, which are so strikingly different from them.
Now, how did the upper whorls get there? Why, of
course they grew, you say. Yes, no doubt, but what
made them grow? Well, the first pair of leaves grew
. out of the seed, where the mother plant had laid by a
little store of albumen on purpose to feed them, exactly
as a reserve of food materials is laid by in the egg
of a hen to feed the growing chick. -Under the
influence of heat and moisture the seed began to
germinate, as we call it—that is to say, oxygen began
to combine with its food stuffs, and motion or sprout-
ing was the natural result. This motion takes in each
plant a determinate course, dependent upon the inti-
mate moleculfr structure of the seed itself; and so
each seed reproduces a plant exactly like the parent,
bar those: small individual variations which are the
ultimate basis of new species—the groundwork upon
which natural selection incessantly works. In the case
of this goose-grass seed the first thing to appear was
the pair of little oval leaves ; and, as the small store of
albumen laid by in the seed was all used up in pro-

Cleavers. 107

ducing them, they had to set to work at once manu-
facturing new organic material for the further develop-
ment of the plant. Luckily they happened -to
grow in a position where the sunlight could fall upon
them—a good many seedlings are more unfortunate,
and so starve to death at the very outset of their
careers—and by the aid of the light they immediately
began decomposing the carbonic acid of the air and
laying by starch for the use of the younger generation
of leaves. At the same time the vigorous young sap
carried these fresh materials of growth into the tiny
sprouting bud which lay between them, and rapidly
unfolded it into such a shoot as you see now before
you, with level whorls of quite differently shaped and
highly developed leaves, disposed in rows of six or
eight around the stem.

Observe that the adult type of leaf appears here
suddenly and as it were by a leap. If we could
reconstruct the whole past history of the goose-grass,
we should doubtless find that each change in its
foliage took place very gradually, by a thousand
minute intermediate stages. Indeed, many of these
stages still survive for us among allied plants. But
the impulsive goose-grass itself clears the whole dis-_
tance between the primitive ancestor and its own
advanced type at a single bound. The intermediate

108 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

stages are all suppressed. This is not always the
case: there are many plants which begin with a
simple type of leaf, and gradually progress to a com-
plex one by many small steps; just as the tadpole
grows slowly to be a frog by budding out first one
pair of legs and then another, and next losing his
tail and his gills, and finally emerging on dry land a
full-fledged amphibian. The goose-grass, however,
rather resembles the butterfly, which passes at once
from the creeping caterpillar to the complete winged
‘form, all the intermediate stages being compressed
into the short chrysalis period ; only our plant has
not even a chrysalis shape to pass through. It is in
reality a very advanced and specially developed type
—the analogue, if not of man among the animals, at
least of a highly respectable chimpanzee or intelligent
gorilla—and so it has learnt at last to pass straight
from its embryo state as a two-leaved plantlet to its
typical adult*form as a trailing, whorled, and prickly .
creeper.

And now let us next look at this adult form itself.
Here I have cut a little bit of it for you with my
penknife, and, if you like, I will lend you my pocket
lens to magnify it slightly. The fragment I have
cut for you consists of a single half-inch of the stem,
‘with one whorl of six long pointed leaves. You will

Cleavers. 109

observe, first, that the stem is quadrangular, not round ;
secondly, that the leaves are lance-shaped, not oval ;
and thirdly, that both stem and leaves are edged with
little sharp curved prickles, pointing backward the
Opposite way to the general growth of the plant.
Let us try to find out what is the origin and meaning
of these three marked peculiarities.

To do so rightly we must begin by considering
the near relations of the goose-grass. In a systematic
botanical classification our
plant is ranked as one of
the stellate tribe, a subdi-
vision of the great family of .
the Rubiacew, or madder
kind. Now, the stellates are
so called because of their
little star-shaped flowers, and
they are all characterised by
two of these goose-grass
peculiarities — namely, the square stems and the
whorled leaves—while the third point, the possession
of recurved prickles on the angles of the stalk and
the edges of the leaves, is a special personal habit of
the goose-grass species itself, with one or two more of
its near relations. It will be best for us, therefore, to
ask first what is the origin and meaning of the charac-

Fic. 24.—Stem of Cleavers.

110 Flowers and ther Pedigrees.

teristics which our plant shares with all its tribe, and
afterwards to pass on to those which are quite con-
fined to its own little minor group of highly evolved
species. .

What, then, is the use to the goose-grass of these
small, narrow thickly whorled leaves? Why are they
not all and always large, flat, and oval, like the two _
seed leaves? The answer must be sought in the
common habits of all the stellate tribe. They are
without exception small creeping, weedy plants, which
grow among the dense and matted vegetation of
hedgerows, banks, heaths, thickets, and other very
tangled places. Now, plants which live in such
situations must necessarily have small or minutely
subdivided leaves, like those of wild chervil, fool's
parsley, herb-Robert, and fumitory. The reason for
this is clear enough. Leaves depend for their growth
upon air and sunlight: they must be supplied with
carbonic acid to assimilate, and solar rays to turn off
the oxygen and build up the carbon into their system.
In open fields or bare spaces, big leaves like burdock,
or rhubarb, or coltsfoot can find food and space ; but
where carbonic acid is scarce, and light is intercepted
by neighbouring plants, all the leaves must needs be
fine and divided into almost threadlike segments.
The competition for the carbon under such circum-

Cleavers. IIt

stances is exceedingly fierce. For example, in water
only very small quantities of gas are dissolved, so
that all submerged water-plants have extremely thin
waving filaments instead of flat blades ; and one such
plant, the water-crowfoot, has even two types of
foliage on the same stem—submerged leaves of this
lacelike character, together with large, expanded,
floating leaves which loll upon the surface something
like those of the water-lily. In the same way hedge-
row weeds, which jostle thickly against one another,
have a constant hard struggle for the carbon and the
sunshine, and grow out accordingly into numerous
small subdivided leaflets, often split up time after
time into segments and sub-segments of the most
intricate sort. I do not mean, of course, that each
individual leaf has its shape wholly determined for it
by the amount of sun and air which it in particular
happens to obtain, but that each species has slowly
acquired by natural selection the kind of leaf which
best fitted its peculiar habitat. Those plants survive
whose foliage adapts them to live in the circum-
stances where it has pleased nature to place them,
and those plants die out without descendants whose
constitution fails in any respect to square with that
inconvenient conglomeration of external facts that

we call their environment.

Ir2 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

That is why the goose-grass and the other stellate
weeds have foliage of this minute character, instead
of broad blades like the two seed leaves. But all
plants of tangly growth do not attain their end in
precisely the same manner. Sometimes one plan
succeeds best and sometimes another. In most cases
the originally round and simple leaf gets split up by
gradual steps into several smaller leaflets. In the
stellate tribe, however, the same object is provided
for in a widely different fashion. Instead of the
primitive leaf dividing into numerous leaflets, a num-
ber of organs which were not originally leaves grow
into exact structural and functional resemblance to
those which were. Strictly speaking, in this whorl
of six little lance-shaped
blades, precisely similar to
one. another, only two op-
posite ones are true leaves ;
the other four are in fact,
to use a very technical
term, interpetiolar stipules.

A stipule, you know, of

Fic. 25.
Interpetiolar Stipules.

course, is a little fringe or
tag which often appears at
the point where the leaf stalk joins the stem, and
its chief use seems to be to prevent ants and other

Cleavers. 113

destructive insects from creeping up the petiole. But
in all the stellate plants the two little stipules on each
side of each leaf have grown gradually out into active
green foliar organs, to supplement and assist the
leaves, until at last they have become as long and
broad as the original leaflets, and have formed with
them a perfect whorl of six or eight precisely similar
blades. How do we know that? you ask. In this
simple way, my dear sir. The other Rubiaceze—that
is to say, the remainder of the great family to which
the stellate tribe belongs—have no whorls, but only
two opposite leaves; and we have many reasons for
supposing that they represent the simpler and more
primitive type, from which the stellate plants are
specialised and highly developed descendants. But
between the opposite leaves grow a pair of small
stipules, occupying just the same place as the whorled
leaflets in the goose-grass ; and in some intermediate
species these stipules have begun to grow out into
expanded green blades, thus preserving for us an
early stage on the road towards the development of
the true stellates. Accordingly, we are justified in
believing that in the whorls of goose-grass the same
process has been carried a step further, till leaves and
stipules have at last become almost indistinguishable.

There is, however, one way in which we can still
6

114, Flowers and their Pedigrees.

distinguish the original true leaves of each whorl from
the leaf-like stipules. Only two leaves out of the six
ever have buds or branches proceeding from their
axils ; and this last token infallibly marks out for us
which are the real primitive opposite pair, and which
the spurious imitation.

What may be the use of the square stem it Hote
be more difficult to decide. Perhaps it may serve to
protect the plant from being trodden down and broken ;
perhaps by its angularity and stringiness it may
render it unpalatable to herbivorous animals. This
much at least is certain, that very few cows or donkeys
will eat goose-grass. There is another large family
of plants—the dead-nettle tribe—all of which have
also square stems ; and they are similarly rejected as
fodder by cattle. Indeed, the very fact that the
stellate tribe have become thus quadrangular, while
the other and earlier members of the madder kind,
like coffee 2nd gardenia, have round stems, in itself
suggests the idea that there must be some sufficient
reason for the change, or else it would never have
taken place ; but, as in many other cases, what that
reason- may be I really cannot with any confidence
inform you from my simple professional ‘chair on the
gate here. If I were only at Kew Gardens, now—
well, that might be a different matter.

And now let us come down to the individual

Cleavers. 115

peculiarities of the goose-grass, and ask what is the
use of the wee recurved prickles which you can see
thickly scattered on the stalk and whorls by the aid
of my pocket lens. You observe that they occur all
along each angle of the stem, and around the edge
and midribs of the leaflets as well. If you try to pull
a bit of goose-grass out of the thicket entire, you will
soon see the function they subserve. The plant, you
notice, resists your effort at once; the little prickles
catch securely on to the bushes and defeat all en-
deavours to tear it away. It is these prickles, indeed,
which are the vazson détre of the goose-grass as a
separate species: they mark it off at once from
almost all the other members of the same group.
There are many allied kinds of galium in England
(for galium is the botanical name of the genus), with
very similar leaves and flowers, but they all grow in
shorter bunches and frequent less thickly populated
situations. Goose-grass, however, has survived and
become a distinct kind just in virtue of these very
hooks. By their aid it is enabled to scramble for
many feet over hedges and bushes, though it is but
an annual plant; and it thus makes use of the firm
stem of yonder hawthorn and this privet bush by our
sides to raise its leaves into open sunny situations
which it could never reach with its own slender stalk

116 Flowers and their Pedigrees

alone. Such an obvious improvement gives it an
undoubted advantage in the struggle for life, and so
in its own special positions it has fairly beaten all the
other galiums out of the field. One of its common
English names—Robin Run-the-hedge—sufficiently
expresses the exact place in nature which it has thus
adapted itself to fill and to adorn.

But how did the goose-grass first develop these
little prickles? That is the question. Granting that
their possession would give it an extra chance in the
struggle for existence, if once they were to occur,
how are we to account for their first beginning? In
this way, as it seems to me. Viewed structurally, the
stout little hooks which arm the stem and leaves are
only thickened hairs. Now hairs, or long pointed
projections from the epidermis, constantly occur in
almost all plants, and in this very family they are
found on the edges of the leaflets and on the angles
of the stem among several allied species. But such
hairs may easily happen to grow a little thicker or
harder, by mere individual or constitutional variation ;
and in a plant with habits like the goose-grass
every increase in thickness and hardness would prove
beneficial, by helping the festoons to creep over the
bushes among which they live. Thus generation after
generation those incipient goose-grasses which best

Cleavers. 117

succeeded in climbing would set most seed and
produce most young, while the less successful would
languish in the shade and never become the proud
ancestors of future plantlets. Even the less highly
developed species, such as the wall galium and the
swamp galium, have little asperities on the edge of
the stem ; but, as they need to climb far less than-the
hedgerow goose-grass, their roughnesses hardly deserve
to be described as prickles. "Our own special subject,
on the other hand, being a confirmed creeper, finds
the prickles of immense use to it, and so has developed
them to a very marked extent. The corn galium,
too, which clings to the growing haulms or stubble of
wheat, has learnt to produce very similar stout hooks ;
while the wild madder, which I suspect is far more
closely related to goose-grass than many other plants
artificially placed in the same genus, has prickles of
like character, but much larger, by whose aid it trails
over bushes and hedges for immense distances.

After the leaves and stem we have to consider the
nature of the flower. Look at one of the blossoms
on the piece I_gave you, and you will easily under-
stand the main points of its structure. You notice
that it consists of a single united corolla, having four
lobes joined at the base instead of distinct and
separate petals, while the centre of course is occupied

118 ‘Flowers and their Pedigrecs.

by the usual little yellow knobs representing the
stamens and pistil. Each goose-grass plant produces
many hundreds of such flowers,
springing in small loose bunches
from the axils of the leaves. What
we have to consider now is the

origin and meaning of the parts
Fic. 26.—Single flower which make them up.
of Cleavers. ‘

We have already seen in deal-
ing with the daisy that the really important organs
of the blossom are the little central yellow knobs,
which do all the active work of fertilising the
ovary and producing the seeds. The stamens, as
we then observed, manufacture the pollen, and
when the pistil is impregnated with a grain of.
this golden dust the fruit ‘begins. to swell and
ripen. But the corolla or coloured frill around the
central organs, which alone is what we call a flower
in ordinary parlafice, shows that the goose-grass is
one of those plants which owe their fertilisation to
the friendly aid of insects. Blossoms of this sort
usually seek to attract the obsequious bee or the
thirsty butterfly by a drop of honey in their nectaries,
supplemented by the advertising allurements of a
sweet perfume and aset of coloured petals. So much
knowledge about the functions of flowers in general

Cleavers. 119

we have already acquired; the question for our
present consideration is this: What gives the goose-
grass flower in particular its peculiar shape, colour,
and arrangement ?
First of all, you will notice that it has a united
corolla—a single fringe of bloom instead of several
distinct flower leaves. This marks its position as a
very proud one in the floral hierarchy ; for you will
remember that only the most advanced blossoms have
their originally separate petals welded into a solid
continuous piece. Once upon a time, indeed, the
early ancestors of our little creeper had five distinct
petals, like those of a dog-rose or a buttercup ; but
that was many, many generations since. In time
these petals began to coalesce slightly at the base, so
as to form a short tube as in the primrose ; and, since
this arrangement made it easier for the insect to fer-
tilise the flowers, because he was more certain to
brush his head in hunting for honey against the
pollen-bearing stamens and the sensitive summit of .
the pistil, all the flowers which exhibited such a ten-
dency gained a decided advantage over their com-
petitors, and lived and flourished accordingly, while
their less fortunate compeers went to the wall. So in
the course of ages such tubular flowers, like harcbells
and heaths, became very common, and to a great

120 Fiowers and their Pedigrees.

extent usurped all the best and most profitable situa-
tions in nature. Among them were the immediate
ancestors of the gonse-grass, which had then regular
long tubular blossoms, instead of having a mere flat,
disk-shaped corolla like the one you see in the goose-
grass before you. But, for a reason which I will pre-
sently tell you, in the goose-grass tribe itself the tube
has gradually become shorter and shorter again,:till
at last there is nothing left of it at all, and the corolla
consists simply of four spreading lobes slightly joined
together by a little rim or margin at the base.

How do we know, you ask, that the goose-grass is
descended from such ancestral flowers having a long
hollow tube? Why may it not be an early form of
tubular blossom, a plant which is just acquiring such
a type of flower, rather than one which has once pos-
sessed it and afterwards lost it? Well, my dear sir,
your objection is natural; but we know it for this
reason. I told you some time since that the other
great branch of the madder family, which had stipules
instead of whorled leaves, was thereby shown to be a
more primitive form of the common type than the
stellate tribe, in which these stipules have developed
into full-grown leaves. Now, all these tropical
madderlike plants have large tubular blossoms, per-
fectly developed ; so that we may reasonably infer

Cleavers. 121

the ancestors of the goose-grass had the same sort of
flowers when they were at the same or some analogous
stage of development. Moreover, amongst the stellate
- plants themselves there are several which still retain
the long tubes to the blossom; and
these are rather the less developed than
the more developed members of the
little group. Such are the pretty blue
field-madder, which has a funnel-shaped
corolla, and the sweet woodruff, which
has bell-shaped flowers. But the ga-
liums, which are the most advanced (or

: Fic. 27.
degraded) species of all, have the tube Mee a Feeld-

madder.

very short or hardly perceptible, and
the more so in proportion as they are most widely
divergent from the primitive type.

Why, however, should a flower which was once
tubular have lost its tube? If it was an advantage
to acquire such a long narrow throat, must it not also
be an advantage always to retain it? That depends
entirely upon the nature of the circumstances to which
the plant must adapt itself. Now the fact is, the
original madder group seems to have had large and
showy flowers, which were fertilised by regular honey-
sucking insects, such as bees and butterflies and hum-
ming-bird hawk-moths. These are tropical shrubs,

ee Flowers and thew Pedigrees.

often of considerable size, and of very different habits
from our little goose-grass. But in the temperate
regions, since the earth has begun to cool into zones,
some of these rubiaceous plants have found out that
they could get along better by becoming little creep-
ing weeds ; and these are the stellates, including our
present friend. Accordingly they have mostly given
up the attempt to attract big honey-sucking insects
whose long proboscis can probe the recesses of jasmine
or woodbine, and have laid themselves out to please
the small flies and miscellaneous little beetles, which
serve almost equally well to carry their pollen from
head to head. Now the flowers which specially cater
for such minor insects are usually quite flat, so that
every kind alike can get at the honey or the pollen ;
and that, I fancy, is why the goose-grass and so many
of its allies have lost their tubes. They are, in fact,
somewhat degenerate forms, descended from highly
adapted trdpical types, but now readjusted to a
humbler though more successful grade of existence.
Closely connected with this question is the other
and very interesting problem of their colour. Why
is goose-grass white? For the very same reason—
because it wishes to attract all sorts of little insects
impartially. For this purpose white is the best
colour. Almost all flowers which thus depend for

Cleavers. 123

fertilisation upon many different species of winged
visitors are white. And, indeed, the sort of colour in
each kind of stellate flower (as in all others) depends
largely upon the sort of insects it wishes to attract.
Thus the little field-madder, which has a long tube
and is fertilised by honey-suckers of a high type, is
blue or pink, as all the family once was, no doubt,
before it began to bid for more vulgar aid. Then the
lesser woodruff, or squinancy-wort, whose tube is
shorter, has white cups tinged with lilac. The goose-
grass and most of its neighbours, whose flowers have
undergone still greater degeneration, are simply white,

' because they wish to please all parties equally, and
white is of course the most neutral colour they could
possibly assume. Finally, the lady’s bedstraw, which
has no tube, depends upon little coJour-loving beetles
for fertilisation, and, like many other beetle flowers, it
is bright yellow. :

This order of degradation exactly reverses the
upward order of chromatic progress ; for, as flowers
advance in type, they pass from yellow, which is the
lowest colour, through white, pink, red, and lilac, to
purple and blue, which are the highest. And when
through any special cause they begin to retrogress,
they pass backward through the same stages in inverse

order.

124 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

Again, you may have observed that I said just
now the primitive ancestor of the goose-grass had five
petals. But the present united corolla has only four
lobes instead of five, and it is this arrangement, ap-
parently, which has gained for the whole tribe the
name of stellate. Now the tropical Rubiacez, which
we saw reason to believe represent an earlier stage of
development than the goose-grass group, have usually
five lobes to the corolla; and in this respect they
agree in the lump with the whole great class of dico-
tyledonous plants to which they belong. Therefore
we may fairly conclude that to have four lobes instead
of five is a mark of further specialisation in the
stellates ; in other words, it is they that have lost a
lobe, not the other madder-worts that have added
one. This, then, gives us a further test of relative
development—or perhaps we ought rather to say of
relative degeneration—among the stellate tribe. Wild
madder, whose, flowers are comparatively large, has
usually five lobes. Yellow crosswort has most of its
blossoms four-lobed, interspersed with a few five-lobed
specimens. Goose-grass occasionally produces large _
five-lobed flowers, but has normally only four lobes.
' The still smaller skulking species have almost inva-
riably four only. In fact, the suppression of one
original petal seems to be due to the general dwarfing

Cleavers. 125

of the flower in most of the stellate tribe. The corolla
has got too small to find room for five lobes, so it cuts
the number down to four instead. This is a common
result of extreme dwarfing. For example, the tiny
central florets of the daisy ought properly to be
pinked out into five points, representing the five
primitive petals, but they often have the number
reduced. ta four. So, too, in the little moschatel, the
outer flowers of each bunch have five lobes, but the
central one, which is- crowded around and closely
jammed by the others, has regularly lost one in every
case. _
There is just one more peculiarity of the goose-
grass blossom which I must not wholly overlook.
You see this rough little bulb or ball beneath the
corolla, covered with incipient prickles? That is the
part which will finally grow into the fruit, after some
friendly insect has brought pollen on his legs from
some neighbouring flower to impregnate the ovary of
this. Now, what I want you to notice is the fact that
the future fruit here lies de/ow the corolla—below the
flower, as most of us would say in ordinary language.
But if you think of a strawberry, a raspberry, ora
poppy, you will recollect that the part which is to
become the fruit there grows adove the corolla, and
that the petals are inserted at its base. This last is

126 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

the original and normal position of the parts. How
and why, then, has the ovary in the goose-grass kind
managed to get below the petals ? Well, the process
has been something like this: When the flowers were
tubular they were surrounded by a tubular calyx, and
the ovary stood in the middle of both. But in the
course of time, in order to increase the chances of
successful fertilisation, the calyx tube, the corolla

Fic. 28.—Strawberry and Asperula.
To show Inferior and Superior Ovaries.

tube, and the ovary in the centre all coalesced into
one solid pieceg-grew together, in fact, just as the
five petals had already done. So now this little bulb
really represents the calyx and ovary combined ;
while the corolla, only beginning to show at the top,
where it expands into its four lobes, looks as if it
started from the head of the fruit, whereas in reality
it once started at the bottom, but has now so com-
pletely united with the calyx in its lower part as to

Cleavers. 127

be quite indistinguishable. Thus the fruit is not in
this plant a mere ripe form of the ovary, but isa
compound organ consisting of the calyx outside, and
the ovary inside, with the tube of the corolla quite
crushed out of existence between them.

Last of all, let us look at the prickly fruit itself in
its ripe condition. Some small fly has now fertilised
the head with pollen from a brother blossom; the
corolla and the stamens have fallen off; the embryo
seeds within have begun to swell ; the mother plant
has stocked them with a little store of horny albumen
to feed the tiny plantlets when they are first cast
forth to shift for themselves in an unsympathetic
world ; and now the fruit here is ;
almost ready to be detached from the
stalk and borne to the spot where
it must make its small experimen

in getting on in life on its own Fic, 29.
account. Before I tell you how it Fit of Cleavers.

manages to get itself transported free of cost to a
suitable situation, I should like you to observe its
shape and arrangement. It consists of two cells or
carpels united in the middle, and each of these contains
a single seed. Once upon a time there were several
cells, as there still are in some of the tropical Rubiacee,

and each cell contained several seeds, as is the case

128 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

with many of the southern species to the present day.
But when the stellate tribe took to being small and
weedy, they gave up their additional seeds and limited
themselves to one only in each cell. This is another
common result of the dwarfing process, and it is found
again in all the daisy tribe and in the umbellates, such
as fool’s parsley. To make up, however, for the loss
in number of the seeds in each fruit, the number of
fruits on each plant is still enormous. How many
there are on a single weed of goose-grass I have
never had the patience to count, but certainly not less
than several hundred. You might find it a nice
amusement for a statistical mind to fill up this lacuna
in our botanical knowledge.

Most of the stellate plants have simple little fruits
without any special means of dispersion, but in the
goose-grass the same sort of prickles as those of the
stem and leaves are further utilised for carrying the
seed to its proper place. You know seeds have many
devices for ensuring their dispersion to a distance
from the mother plant. Some are surrounded by
edible pulp, as in the case of the raspberry or the
gooseberry ; and these are swallowed by birds or
animals, through whose body they pass undigested,
and thus get deposited under circumstances peculiarly
favourable to their germination and growth. Others

Cleavers. 129

have little wings or filaments, as in the case of the
dandelion or the valerian; and these get blown by’
the wind to their final resting-place. Yet others,
again, are provided with hooks or prickles, like the
burr and the houndstongue, by whose means they
‘cling to the wool of sheep, the feathers and legs of
birds, or the hair of animalsfand thus get carried from
hedge to hedge and rubbed off against the bushes,
so as to fall on to the ground beneath. Now this
last plan is especially well adapted for a plant like
the goose-grass, which lives by straggling over low
brambles and hawthorns, for it ensures the deposition
of the seed in the exact place where the full-grown weed
will find such support and friendly assistance as it pecu-
liarly requires. Accordingly, we may be sure that if
any half-developed goose-grass ever showed any
tendency to prickliness on its fruit, it would gain a
‘great advantage over its neighbours in the struggle
for existence, and the tendency would soon harden
under the influence of natural selection into a fixed
habit of the species. Is there any way in which such
a tendency could be set up?

Yes, easily enough, as it seems to me. You
remember the outer coat of the fruit is really the
calyx, and this calyx would be naturally more or less
hairy, like the original leaves. We have only to sup-

130 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

pose that the calyx hairs followed suit with the stem
hairs, and began to develop into stiff prickles, in
order to understand how the burrlike mechanism was
first set up. Supposing it once begun, in ever so
slight a degree, every little burr which succeeded in
sticking to a sheep’s legs or a small bird’s breast
would be pretty sure, sooner or later, of reaching a
place where its seeds could live and thrive. It is
from this habit of cleaving or sticking to one’s legs
that the plant has obtained one of its English names
—cleavers. Moreover, to make the development of
the burr all the more comprehensible, many of the
other galiums have rather rough or granulated fruits,
while one kind—the wall galium—which in England
has smooth or warty fruit, has its surface covered in
southern Europe with stiff hairs or bristles. Another
English galium besides goose-grass has hooked bristles
on its fruit, though they are not so hard or adhesive as
in our own proper subject. Thus the very steps in the
evolution of the bristly fruit are clearly preserved for
us to the present day in oneor otherof theallied species.
On the other hand, the very similar little corn
galium, which has prickles on its stem and leaves to
enable it to cling to the growing straw in the wheat-
fields, has no hooks at all upon its fruit. Instead of
a burr it produces only little rough-looking knobs or

Cleavers. 131

capsules. At first sight, this difference between the
plants is rather puzzling, but when we come to con-
sider the peculiar habits of the corn galium we can
see at once the reason for the change. Like most
other cornfield weeds, it blossoms with the wheat, and
its seed ripens with the mellowing of the shocks.
Both are cut down together, and the seed of the
galium is thrashed out at the same time as the grain.
Thus it gets sown with the seed corn from year to
year, and it would only lose by having a prickly fruit,
which would get carried away to places less adapted
for its special habits than the arable fields. It has
accommodated itself to its own peculiar corner in
nature, just as the goose-grass has accommodated
itself to the hedgerows and thickets. So again, in the
wild madder, the fruit, instead of becoming rough and
clinging, has grown soft and pulpy, so as to form a
small blackish berry, much appreciated by birds, who
thus help unconsciously to disperse its seeds. Each
_ plant simply goes in the way that circumstances lead
it, and that is why we get such infinite variety of
detail and special adaptation even within the narrow
limits of a single small group.

And now I think you are tired both of your seat
on the gate and of my long sermon. Yet the points
to which I have called your attention are really only

‘132 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

a very few out of all the facts which go to make up
the strange, eventful life-history of this little creeper.
If you had but leisure and patience to hear me I
might go on to point out many other curious details
of organisation which help us to reconstruct the
family pedigree of the goose-grass. There is not a
single organ in the plant which does not imply whole
volumes of unwritten ancestral annals ; and to set
them all forth in full would require not a single hour
but a whole course of ten or twenty sermons. Still, I
hope I have done enough to suggest to you the
immense wealth of thought which the goose-grass is
capable of calling up in the mind of the evolutionary
botanist ; and I trust, when you next get your clothes
covered with those horrid little cleavers, you will be
disposed to think more tenderly and respectfully
than formerly of an ancient and highly developed
English weed. _

The Origin of Wheat. 133

vz
THE ORIGIN OF WHEAT.

WHEAT ranks by descent as a degenerate and de-
graded lily. Such in brief is ‘the text which this
paper sets out to prove, and which the whole course
of evolutionary botany tends every day more and
. more fully to confirm. By thus from the very outset
placing clearly before our eyes the goal of our argu-
‘ment, we shall be able the better to understand as we
go whither each item of the cumulative evidence is
really tending. We must endeavour to start with the
simplest forms of the great group of plants to which the
cereals and the other grasses belong, and we must try
to see by what steps this primitive type gave birth, first
to the brilliantly coloured lilies, next to the degraded
rushes and sedges, and then to the still more degene-
rate grasses, from one or other of whose richer grains
man has finally developed his wheat, his rice, his
millet, and his barley. We shall thus trace through-
out the whole pedigree of wheat from the time when

134 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

its ancestors first diverged from the common stock of
the lilies and the water-plantains, to the time when
savage man found it growing wild among the untilled
plains of prehistoric Asia, and took it under his special

FIG. 30.
Head of Wheat.

protection in the little garden plots
around his wattled hut, whence it has
gradually altered under his constant
selection into the golden grain that now
covers half the lowland tilth of Europe
and America. There is no page in
botanical history more full of genuine
romance than this; and there is no
page in which the evidence is clearer or.
more convincing for those who will take
the easy trouble to read it aright.
Moreover, the case of wheat is a
very interesting one, after the case of
the daisy and of cleavers, because it
€xhibits a different order of evolution,
that namely of continuous degradation.
Whi'e the daisy has gone constantly up,

and while the goose-grass has fallen but a little after

a long course of upward development, the grasses

generally have from the very first exhibited a con-

stant and unbroken structural decline.

The fixed point from which we start on our

The Origin of Wheat. 135

inquiry is the primitive and undifferentiated ancestral
flowering plant. Into the previous history of the line
from which the cereals are ultimately descended, I do
not propose here to enter. It must suffice for our
present purpose to say dogmatically that the flowering
plants as a whole derive their origin from a still
earlier flowerless stock, akin in many points to the
ferns and the club-mosses, but differing from them in
the relatively important part borne in its economy by
the mechanism for cross-fertilisation. The earliest
flowering plant of the great monocotyledonous divi-
sion (the only one with which we shall here have
anything to do) started apparently by possessing a
very simple and inconspicuous blossom, with a central
row of three ovaries, surrounded by two or more rows
of three stamens each, without any coloured petals or
other ornamental adjuncts of any sort. I need hardly
here explain even to the unbotanical reader that the
ovaries contain the embryo seeds, and that they only
swell into fertile fruits after they have been. duly
impregnated by pollen from the stamens, preferably
those of ariother plant, or at least of another blossom
on the same stem. Seeds fertilised by pollen from
their own flower, as Mr. Darwin has shown, produce
relatively weak and sickly seedlings ; seeds fertilised
by pollen from a sister plant of the same species

136 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

produce relatively strong and hearty seedlings. The
two cases are exactly analogous to the effects of
breeding in and in or of an infusion of fresh blood
among races of men and animals. Hence it naturally
happens that those plants whose organisation in any
way favours the ready transference of pollen from one
flower to another gain an advantage in the struggle for
existence, and so tend on the average to thrive and to
survive ; while those plants whose organisation renders
such transference difficult or impossible stand at a con-
stant disadvantage in the race for life, and are liable to
fall behind in the contest, or at least to survive only in
the most unfavourable and least occupied parts of the
vegetal economy. Familiar as this principle has now
become to all scientific biologists, it is yet so absolutely
necessary for the comprehension of the present ques-
tion, whose key-note it forms, that I shall make no
apology for thus once more stating it at the outset
as the general law which must guide us through all
the intricacies of the development of wheat.

Our primitive ancestral lily, not yet a lily or any-
thing else nameable in our existing terms, had thus
to start with, one triple set of ovaries, and about three
triple sets of pollen-bearing stamens ; and to the very
end this triple arrangement may be traced under more
or less difficult disguises in every one of its numerous

The Origin of Wheat. —=——_:137

modern descendants. It thus differed from the
primitive ancestor of dicotyledonous flowers like the
daisy and the goose grass, which as we have seen
had its parts arranged in whorls of five, not in whorls
of three, like the ancestral lily. No single survivor,
however, now represents for us this earliest ideal
stage; we can only infer its existence from the
diverse forms assumed by its various divergent
modifications at the present day, all of which show
many signs of being ultimately derived from some
such primordial and simple ancestor. The first step
in advance consisted in the acquisition of petals, which
are now possessed in a more or less rudimentary
shape by all the tribe of trinary flowers, or at least if
quite absent are shown to have been once present by
intermediate links or by abortive rudiments. There
are even now flowers of this class which do not at
present possess any observable petals at all; but
these can be shown (as we shall see hereafter) not to
be unaltered descendants of the prime type, but on
the contrary to be very degraded and profoundly
modified forms, derived from later petal-bearing
ancestors, and still connected with their petal-bearing
allies by all stages of intervening degeneracy. The
original petalless lily has long since died out before
the fierce competition of its own. more advanced
7

138 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

descendants; and the existing petalless reeds or
cuckoo-pints, as well as the apparently petalless
wheats and grasses, are special adaptive forms of the
newer petal-bearing rushes and lilies.

The origin of the coloured petals, we know, is
almost certainly due to the selective action of primzval
insects. The soft pollen, and perhaps too the slight
natural exudations around the early flowers, afforded
food to the ancestral creatures not then fully devel-
oped into anything that we could distinctively call a
bee or a butterfly. But as the insects flew about from
one head to another in search of such food, they
carried small quantities of pollen with them from
flower to flower. This pollen, brushed from their
bodies on to the sensitive surface of the ovaries,
fertilised the embryo seeds, and so gave the fortunate
plants which happened to attract the insects all the
benefits of a salutary cross. Accordingly, the more
the flowers succeeded in attracting the eyes of their
winged guests, the better were they likely to succeed
in the struggle for existence. In some cases, the
outer row of stamens appears to have become flattened
and petal-like, as still often happens with plants in
the rich soil of our gardens; and in these flatter
stamens the oxidised juices assumed perhaps a
livelier yellow than even the central stamens them-

The Ovigin of Wheat. | 139

selves. If the flowers had fertilised their own ovaries
this change would of course have preved disadvan-
tageous, by depriving them entirely of the services of
one row of stamens; for the new flattened and petal--
like structures lost at once the habit of producing
pollen. But their value as attractive organs for
alluring the eyes of insects more than counterbalanced
this slight apparent disadvantage ; and the new petal-
bearing blossoms soon outstripped and utterly lived
down all their simpler petalless allies. By devoting
one outer row of stamens to the function of alluring
the fertilising flies, they have secured the great
benefit of perpetual cross fertilisation, and so have got
the better of all their less developed competitors. At
the same time, the exudations at the base of the
petals have assumed the definite form of sweet nectar
or honey, a liquid which is mainly composed of sugar,
that universal allurer of animal tastes. By this means
the plants save their pollen from depredations, and
at the same time offer the insects a more effectual
because a more palatable sort of bribe.

Passing rapidly over these already familiar initial
stages, we may go on to those more special and dis-
tinctive facts which peculiarly concern the ancestry of
the lilies and cereals. It is probable that the nearest
modern analogue of the earliest petal-bearing trinary

140 ' Flowers and their Pedigrees.

flowers is to be found in the existing alisma tribe,
including our own English arrowheads and flowering
rushes. As a rule, indeed, it may be said that fresh-
‘water plants and animals tend to preserve for us very
ancient types indeed ; and all the alismas are marsh
or pond flowers of an extremely simple character.
They have usually three greenish sepals outside each
blossom, inclosing one whorl of three white or pink
petals, two or three whorls of three stamens each, and

(i My

Fic. 31.—Single flower of Alisma plantago.

a number of Separate ovaries, which are not united, as
in the more developed true lilies, into a single capsule,
but remain quite distinct, each with its own individual
stigma or sensitive surface. Even within this rela-
tively early and simple group, however, several grada-
tions of development may yet be traced. I incline to
believe that our English smaller alisma, a not un-
common plant in wet ditches and marshes throughout

The Origin of Wheat. I4I

the whole of southern Britain, represents the very
earliest petal-bearing type in this line of development ;
indeed, save that its petals are now pinky-white,
while those of the original ancestor were almost
certainly yellow, we might almost say that the marsh-
weed in question was really the earliest petal-bearing
plant of which we are in search. It closely resembles
in appearance, and in the arrangement of its parts,
the buttercups, which are the earliest existing
members of the other or quinary division of flowering
plants ; and in both we seem to get a survival of a
still earlier common ancestor, only that in the one the
parts are arranged in rows of three, while in the other
they are arranged in rows of five ; and concomitantly
with this distinction go the two or three other dis-
tinctions which mark off the two main classes from
one another—namely, that the one has leaves with
parallel veins, only one seed-leaf to the embryo, and
an endogenous stem, while the other has leaves with
netted veins, two seed-leaves to the embryo, and an
exogenous stem. Neverthless, in spite of such funda-
mental differences, we may say that the alismas and
the buttercups really stand very close to one another
in the order of development. When the two main
branches of flowering plants first diverged from one
another, the earliest petal-bearing form they produced

142 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

on one divergent branch was the alisma, or some-
thing very like it; the earliest petal-bearing form
they produced on the other divergent branch was the
buttercup, or something very like it. Hence, when-
ever we have to deal with the pedigree of either great
line, the fixed historical point from which we must
needs set out must always be the typical alismas or

a, ovaries ; 4, stamens, inner whorl ; ¢, stamens, outer whorl ; ¢, petals
é, calyx-pieces,

Fic. 32.-gDiagram of primitive monocotyledonous flower.

the typical buttercups. The accompanying diagram
will show at once the relation of parts in the simplest
trinary flowers, and will serve for comparison: at a
later stage of our argument with the arrangement of
their degraded descendants, the wheats and grasses.
Our own’ smaller alisma has a number of ovaries
loosely scattered about in its centre, as in the butter:

The Origin of Wheat. 143

cups, with two rows of three stamens outside them,
. and then a single row of three petals, followed by the
calyx or inclosing cup of three green pieces. Its
close ally the water-plantain, however, shows signs of
some advance towards the typical lily form in the
arrangement of its ovaries in a single ring, often
loosely divisible into three sets. And in the pretty
pink flowering rush (not of course a rush at all in the
scientific sense) the advance is still more marked in
that the number of ovaries is reduced to six, that is
to say, two whorls of three each, accompanied by nine
stamens, similarly divisible into three rows. In all
‘these very early forms (as in their analogues the
buttercups) the main point to notice is this, that there
is as yet no regular definiteness in the numerical
relations of the parts. They tend to run, it is true,
in rows of three ; but often these rows are so numerous
and so confused that nature loses count, so to speak,
and it is only in their higher and more developed
members that we begin to arrive at any distinct sym-
metry, such as that of the flowering rush. Even here,
the symmetry is far from being so perfect as in the
later lilies. There are, however, a few very special
members of the alisma family in which the approach
to the true lilies is even greater. These are well
represented in England by our own common arrow-

144 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

grasses—inconspicuous little green flowers, with three
calyx-pieces, three petals, six stamens, and either six
or three ovaries. Here, too, the ovaries are at first
united into a single pistil (as it is technically called),
though they afterwards separate as they ripen into
three or six distinct little capsules. One of our
British kinds, the marsh arrowgrass, has almost
reached the lily stage of development ; for it has
three calyx-pieces, three petals, six stamens, and
three ovaries, exactly like the true lilies ; but it falls
short of their full type in the fact that its pistil
divides when ripe into separate capsules, whereas the
pistil of the lilies always remains united to the very
end; and this minute difference suffices, in the eyes
of systematic botanists, to make it an alisma rather
than a lily. In reality, it ought to be regarded as a
benevolent neutral—a_ surviving intermediate link
between the two larger classes,

The speciMlisation which makes the true lilies thus
depends upon two points. In the first place, all the
parts are regularly symmetrical, except that there are
two rows of stamens to each one of the other organs:
the common formula being three calyx-pieces, three
petals, six stamens, and three ovaries. In the second
place, the three ovaries are completely combined
together into a single three-celled pistil. The advan-

The Origin of Wheat. 145

tage which the lilies thus gain is obvious enough.
Their bright petals, usually larger and more attrac-
tive than those of the alismas, allure a sufficient
number of insects to enable them to dispense with
the numerous stamens and ovaries of their primitive
ancestors. Moreover, this diminution in number is
accompanied by an incréase in effectiveness and

Fic. 33.—Flower of White Lily and section of ovary.

specialisation : for the lilies have only three sensitive
surfaces to their pistil, combined on a single stalk:
and the honey is usually so placed at its base that the
insect cannot fail to brush off pollen at every visit
against all three surfaces at once. Again, while the
number of ovaries has been lessened, the number of
seeds in each has been generally increased, which also

146 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

marks a step in advance, since it allows many seeds
to be impregnated by a single act of pollination. The
result of all these improvements, carried further by
some lilies than by others, is that the family has
absolutely outstripped all others of the trinary class
in the race for the possession of the earth, and has
now occupied all the most favourable positions in
every part of the world. While the alismas and their
allies have been so crowded out that they now linger
only in a few ponds, marshes, and swamps, to which
the more recent lily tribe have not yet had time
fully to adapt themselves, the true lilies and their yet
more advanced descendants have taken seizin of
every climate and every zone upon our planet, and
are to be found in every possible position, from
the arborescent yuccas and huge agaves of the
tropics to the wild hyacinths of our English wood-
lands and the graceful asphodels of the Mediter-
ranean hill-sides.

The lilies themselves, again, do not all stand on
one plane of homogeneous evolution. There are
different grades of development still surviving among °
the class itself. The little yellow gagea (fig. 34) which
_ grows sparingly in sandy English fields may be taken
as a very fair representative of the simplest and earliest
true lily type. It bearsa small bunch of little golden

The Origin of Wheat. 1.47

flowers, only to be distinguished from the higher
alismas by their united ovaries: for though both
calyx and petals are here brightly coloured, that is
also the case in the flowering rushes, and in many
others of the alisma group.
On the other hand, though |
it may be said generally of
the lilies that their calyx and
petals are coloured alike—
sometimes so much so as to
be practically indistinguish-
able—yet there are many
kinds which still retain the
greenish calyx-pieces, and
that even in the more de-
veloped genera. But most of

the lilies are far handsomer

Fic. 34.—Gagea lutea.

than gagea and its allies : even
in England itself we have such very conspicuous and
attractive flowers as the purple fritillaries, which every
Oxford man has gathered by handfuls in the spongy
meadows about Iffley lock, with their dark spotted
petals converging into a bell, and the nectaries at the
base producing each a latge-drop of luscious honey.
Some, like our wild hyacinths, have assumed a
tubular shape under stress of insect selection, the

148 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

better to promote proper fertilisation ; and at the
same time have acquired a blue pigment, to allure the
eyes of azure-loving bees. Others have become
dappled with spots to act as honey-guides, or have
produced brilliant variegated blossoms to attract the
attention of great tropical insects. Our British: lilies
alone comprise such various examples as the lily-of-
the-valley, a tubular white scented species, adapted
for fertilisation by moths ; the very similar Solomon’s
seal ; the butcher’s broom ; the wild tulip ; the star-of-
Bethlehem ; the various squills ; the asparagus ; the
grape hyacinth ; and the meadow saffron. Some of
them (for example, asparagus and butcher’s broom)
have also developed berries in place of dry capsules ;
and these berries, being eaten by birds which digest
the pulp, but not the actual seeds, aid in the disper-
sion of the seedlings, and so enable the plant to
reduce the total number of -seeds to three only, or
one in each ovary. Among familiar exotics of the
same family: may be mentioned the hyacinth, tube-
rose, tulip, asphodel, yucca, and most of: the so-called
lilies, In short, no tribe supplies us with a greater
number ‘of handsome garden flowers, for the most
part highly adapted to a very advanced oP of insect
fertilisation. ’

Properly to understand the development of our

The Origin of Wheut. 149

existing wheat from this brilliant and ornamental
family, as well as to realise the true nature of its
relation to allied orders, we must first glance briefly
at the upward evolution of the other branches de-
scended from the true lilies, and then recur to the
downward evolution which finally resulted in the
production of the degenerate grasses. In the main
line of progressive development, the lilies gave origin
to the amaryllids, familiarly represented in England
by the snowdrops and daffodils, a family which is
technically described as differing from the lilies in
having an inferior instead of a superior ovary—that is
to say, with the pistil apparently placed below instead
of above the point where the petals and calyx-pieces
are inserted. From the evolutionary point of view,
however, this difference (as we saw in the case of the
goose-grasses) merely amounts to saying that the
amaryllids are tubular lilies, in which the tube has
coalesced with the walls of the ovary, so that the
petals seem to begin at its summit instead of at its
base. The change gives still greater certainty of
impregnation, and therefore benefits the race accord-
ingly. At the same time, the amaryllids, being
probably a much newer development than the true
lilies, have not yet had leisure to gain quite so firm a
footing in the world ; though on the other hand many

150 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

of them are far more minutely adapted for special
insect fertilisation than their earlier allies. They
include the so-called Guernsey lilies of our. gardens,
as well as the huge American aloes which all visitors
to the Riviera know so well on the dry hills around
Nice and Cannes. The iris family‘are a similar but
_ rather more advanced tribe, with only three stamens
instead of six, their superior organisation allowing
them readily to dispense with half their complement,
and so to attain the perfect trinary symmetry of three
sepals, three petals, three stamens, and three ovaries.
Among them, the iris and the crocus are circular in
shape, but some very advanced types, such as the
gladiolus, have acquired a bilateral form, in correla-
tion with special insect visits. From these, the step
is not great to the orchids, undoubtedly the highest
of all the trinary flowers, with the triple arrangement
almost entirely obscured, and with the most. extra-
ordinary varfeties of adaptation to fertilisation by
bees or even by humming- birds in the most marvel-
lous fashions. Alike by their inferior ovary, their
bilateral shape, their single stamen, their remarkable
forms, their brilliant colours, and their occasional
mimicry of insect life, the orchids show themselves
to be by far the highest of the trinary flowers, if not,
indeed, of the entire vegetable world.

The Origin of Wheat. 151

From this brief sketch of the main line of upward
evolution from lilies to orchids, we must now return
to the grand junction afforded us by the lilies them-
selves, and travel down the other line of degeneracy
and degradation which leads us on to the grasses and
the cereals, including at last our own familiar culti-
vated wheat. Any trinary flower with three calyx-
pieces, three petals, six stamens, and a three-celled
pistil not concealed within an inclosing tube, is said
to be a lily, as long as it possesses brightly coloured
and delicate petals. There are, however, a large
number of somewhat specialised lilies with very small
and inconspicuous petals, which have been artificially
separated by botanists as the rush family, not because
they were really different in any important point of
structure from the acknowledged lilies, but merely
because they had not got such brilliant and handsome
blossoms. These despised and neglected plants, how-
ever, supply us with the first downward step on the
path of degeneracy which leads at last to the grasses,
and they may be considered as intermediate stages in
the scale of degradation, fortunately preserved for us
by exceptional circumstances to the present day.
Even among the true lilies, there are some, like the
garlic and onion tribe; which show considerable marks
of degeneration, owing to some decline from the type

152 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

of insect fertilisation to the undesirable habit of
- fertilising themselves. Thus, while our common
English rampsons or wild garlic has pretty and con-
spicuous white blossoms, some other members of the
tribe, such as the crow allium, have very small
greenish flowers, often reduced to mere shapeless
bulbs. Among the true rushes, however, the course
of development has been somewhat different. These
water-weeds have acquired the habit of trusting for
fertilisation to the wind, which carries. the pollen of
one blossom to the sensitive surface of another, per-
haps at less trouble and expense to the parent plant
than would be necessary for the allurernent of bees
or flies by all the bribes of brilliant petals and
honeyed secretions. To effect this object, their
stamens hang out pensile to the breeze, on long
slender filaments, so lightly poised that the merest
breath of air amply suffices to dislodge the pollen:
while the sehsitive surface of the ovaries is prolonged
into a branched and feathery process, seen under the
microscope to be studded with adhesive glandular
knobs, which readily catch and retain every golden
grain of the fertilising powder which may chance to
be wafted toward them on the wings of the wind.
Under such circumstances, the rush kind could only
lose by possessing brightly coloured and attractive

The Origin of Wheat. 153

petals, which would induce insects uselessly to
_ plunder their precious stores: and so all those rushes
which showed any tendency in that direction would
soon be weeded out by natural selection ; while those
which produced only dry and inconspicuous petals
would become the parents of future generations, and
would hand on their own peculiarities to their de-
scendants after them. Thus the existing rushes are
all plain little lilies with dry brownish flowers, speci-
ally adapted to: wind-fertilisation alone.

Among the rushes themselves, again, there are
various levels of retrogressive development—retro-
gressive, that is to say, if we regatd the lily family
as an absolute standard; for the various alterations
undergone ‘by the different flowers are themselves
adaptive to their new condition, though that condition
is itself decidedly lower than the one from which they
started. The common rush and its immediate con-
geners resemble the lilies from which they spring in
having several seeds in each of the three cells which
compose their pistil. But there is an interesting
group of small grass-like plants, known as wood-
rushes, which combine all the technical characteristics
of the true rushes with a general character extremely
like that of the grasses. They have long, thin, grass-
like blades in the place of leaves ; and what is still

154 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

more important, as indicating an approach to the
essentially one-seeded grass tribe, they have only
three seeds in the flower, one to each cell of the
capsule. These seeds are comparatively large, and
are richly stored with food-stuffs for the supply of the
young plantlet. One such richly supplied embryo
is worth. many little unsupported grains, since it
stands a much better chance than they do of surviv-

Fic. 35.—Single flower of Woodrush.

ing in the struggle for existence. The wood-rushes
may thus Be regarded as some of the earliest plants
among the great trinary class to adopt those tactics
of storing gluten, starch, and other food-stuffs along
_ with the embryo, which have given the cereals their
acknowledged superiority as producers of human food.
They are closely connected with the rushes, on the
one hand, by sundry intermediate species which
possess thin leaves instead of cylindrical pithy blades ;

The Origin of Wheat. 155

and they lead on to the grasses, on the other, by
reason of their very grass-like foliage, and their re-
duced number of large, well-furnished, starchy secds.
In another particular, the rush family supplies us
with a useful hint in tracing out the pedigree of the
grasses and cereals. Their flowers are for the most
part crowded together in large tufts or heads, each
containing a considerable number of minute separate
blossoms. Even among the true lilies we find some
cases of such crowding in the hyacinths and the
squills, or still better in the onion and garlic tribe.
But with the wind-fertilised rushes, the grouping
together of the flowers has important advantages,
because it enables the pollen more easily to fix upon
one or other of the sensitive surfaces, as the stalks
‘sway backward and forward before a gentle breeze.
Among yet more developed or degraded wind-fertil-
ised plants, this crowding of the blossoms becomes
even more conspicuous. A common American rush-
like water-plant, known as eriocaulon, helps us to
bridge over the gap between the rushes and such
compound flowers as the sedges and grasses. Erio-
caulon and its allies have always one seed only in each
cell of the pistil: and they have also generally a very
delicate corolla and calyx, of from four to six pieces,
representing the original three sepals and three petals

156 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

of the lilies and rushes. But their minute blossoms
are closely crowded together in globular heads, the
stamens and pistils being here divided in separate
flowers, though both kinds of flowers are combined in
each head. From an ancestral. form not unlike this,
but still more like the wood rushes, we must get both .
our sedges and our grasses. And though the sedges
themselves do not stand in the direct line of descent
to wheat and the other cereals, they are yet so valuable
as an illustration from their points of analogy and of
difference that we must turn aside for a moment to
examine the gradual course of their evolution.

The simplest and most primitive sedges now
surviving, though very degenerate in type, yet retain
some distinct traces of their derivaticn from earlier
rush-like and lily-like ancestors. In the earliest exist-
ing type, known as scirpus, the calyx and petals which
were brightly coloured in the lilies, and which were
reduced to €ix brown scales in the rushes, have under-
gone a further degradation to the form of six small
dry bristles, which now merely remain as rudimentary
relics of a once useful and beautiful structure. In
some species of scirpus, too, the number of these
bristles is reduced from six to four or three. There
is still one whorl of three stamens, however; but the
second whorl has disappeared ; while the pistil now

The Origin of Wheat. 157

contains only one seed instead of three; though it
still retains some trace of the original three cells in
the fact that there are three sensitive surfaces, united
together at their base into one stalk or style. Each
such diminution in the number of seeds is always
_accompanied by an increase in the effectiveness of
those which remain; the difference is just analogous
to that between the myriad ill-provided eggs of the

Fic. 36. Fic. 37.
Single flower of Scirpus. Male and Female flower of Carex,

cod, whose young fry are for the most part snapped
up as soon as hatched, and the two or three eggs of
birds, which watch their brood with such tender care,
or the single young of cows, horses, and elephants,
which guard their calves or foals almost up to the
age of full maturity. What the bird or the animal
effects by constant feeding with worms or milk, the

158 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

plant effects by storing its seed with assorted food
stuffs for the sprouting embryo.

In the more advanced or more degenerate sedges
we get still further differentiation for the special
function of wind-fertilisation. Take, as an example
of these most developed types on this line of develop-
ment, the common English group of carices (fig. 37).
In these, the flowers have absolutely lost all trace of
a perianth (that is to say, of the calyx and petals), for
they do not possess even the six diminutive bristles
which form the last relics of those organs in their
allies, the scirpus group. Each flower is either male
or female—that is to say, it consists of stamens or
‘ovaries alone. The male flowers are represented by
a single scale or bract, inclosing three stamens ; and

- in some species even the stamens are reduced to a
pair, so that all trace of the original trinary arrange-
ment is absolutely lost. The female flowers are
represented “by a single ovary, inclosed in a sort of
loose bag, which may perhaps be the final rudiment
of a tubular bell-shaped corolla like that of the
hyacinth. This ovary contains a single seed, but its
shape is often triangular, and it has usually three
stigmas or sensitive surfaces, thus dimly pointing
back to the three distinct cells of its lily-like ances-
tors, and the three separate ovaries of its still earlier

The Origin of Wheat. 159

alisma-like progenitors, In many species, however,
even this last souvenir of the trinary type has been
utterly obliterated, the ovary having only two
stigmas, and assuming a flattened two-sided shape.
In all the carices, the flowers are loosely arranged
in compact spikes and spikelets, with their mobile
stamens hanging out freely to the breeze, and their
feathery stigmas prepared to catch the slightest grain
of pollen which may happen to be wafted their way
by any passing breath of air. The varieties in their
arrangement, however, are almost as infinite among
the different species as those of the grasses them-
selves; sometimes the male and female flowers are
produced on separate plants; sometimes they grow
in separate spikes on the same plant ; sometimes the
same spike has male flowers at the top and female at
the bottom ; sometimes the various flowers are mixed
up with one another at top and bottom in a regular
hotch-potch of higgledy-piggledy confusion. But all
the sedges alike are very grass-like in their aspect,
with thin blades by way of leaves, and blossoms on
tall heads as in the grasses. In fact, the two families
are never accurately distinguished by any except
technical botanists; to the ordinary observer, they
are all grasses together, without petty distinctions of
genus and species. Like the grasses, too, the sedges

160 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

are mostly plants of the open wind-swept plains or
marshy levels, where the facilities for wind-fertilisa-
tion are greatest and most constantly present."

And now, from this illustrative digression, let us
hark back again to the junction point of the rushes,
whence alike the sedges and the grasses appear to
diverge. In order to understand the nature of the
steps by which the cereals have been developed from
rush-like ancestors, it will be necessary to look shortly
at the actual composition of the flower in grasses,
which is the only part of their organism differing
appreciably from the ordinary lily type. The blossoms
of grasses, in their simplest form, consist of several
little green florets, arranged in small clusters, known
as spikelets, along a single common axis. Of this
arrangement, the head of wheat itself offers a familiar
and excellent example. If we pull to pieces one of the
spikelets composing such a head, we find it to consist
of four or fi¥e distinct florets. Omitting special fea-
tures and unnecessary details, we may say that each
floret is made up of two chaffy scales (e, @), known as
pales, and representing the calyx, together with a pair

1 The sedges are not, in all probability, a real natural farsi, but
are a group of heterogeneous degraded lilies, containing almost all thore
kinds in which the reduced florets are covered by a single conspicuous

glume-like bract. It will be seen from the sequel that these bracts are
not truly homologous to the glumes or outer palezx of grasses,

The Origin of Wheat. 161

of small white petals (c) known as lodicules, three
stamens (4), and an ovary with two feathery styles (a).
Moreover, the two pales or calyx-pieces are not
similar and symmetrical, for the outer one (¢) is sim-
ple and convex, while the inner one (d) is apparently
double, being made up of two pieces rolled into one,
and still possessing two green midribs, which show

Fic. 38. FIG. 39.
Details of flower of Wheat. Flower of Wheat (g umes removed).

distinctly like ribs on its flat outer surface. Here, it
will immediately be apparent, the traces of the original
trinary arrangement are very slight indeed.

But when we come to inquire into the rationale
and genesis of these curiously one-sided flowers, it is
not difficult s see that they have been ultimately

162 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

derived from trinary blossoms of the rush-like type.
The first and most marked divergence from that type,
for which the analogy of the sedges has already pre-
pared us, is the reduction of the ovary to a single one-
seeded cell, whose ripe fruity form is known as a
grain. At one time, we may feel pretty sure, there
must have existed a group of nascent grasses, which
only differed from the wood-rush genus in having a
single-celled ovary instead of a three-celled pistil with
one seed in each cell; and even the ovary of this
primitive grass must have retained one mark of its
trinary origin in its possession of three styles to its
one grain, thus pointing back (as most sedges still do)
to its earlier rush-like origin. That hypothetical form
must have had three sepals, three petals, six stamens,
and one three-styled ovary. But the peculiar shape
of modern grass-flowers is clearly due to their very
spiky arrangement along the edge of the axis. Inthe
wood-rushes and the sedges, we see some approach to
this condition ; but in the grasses, the crowding is far
more marked, and the one-sidedness has accordingly
become far more conspicuous. Suppose we begin to
crowd a number of wind-fertilised lily-like flowers
along an axis in this manner, taking care that the
stamens and the sensitive feathery styles are always
turned outward to catch the breeze (for otherwise they

The Origin of Wheat. —163

will die out at once), what ‘sort of result shall we
finally get ?

In the first place, the calyx, consisting of three
pieces, will stand towards the crowded stem or axis in
such a fashion that one piece will be free and exterior,
- while two pieces will be interior and next the stem,
thus— ;

oO

aa

a
Now, the effect of constant crushing in this direction
will be that the two inner calyx-pieces will be slowly
dwarfed, and will tend to coalesce with one another ;
and this is what has actually happened with the inner
pale of wheat and of other grasses, though the mid-
ribs of the two originally separate pieces still show
on the compound pale, like dark green lines down its
centre.. Thus, in the fully developed grasses, in place
of a trinary calyx, we get two chaffy scales or pales,
the outer one representing a single sepal, and the
inner one, which has been dwarfed by pressure
against the stem, representing two sepals rolled into
one, with two midribs still remaining as evidence of
their original distinctness.

Next, in the case of the petals, which alternate
with the sepals ofthe calyx, the relation to the stem
is exactly reversed ; for we have here’ two petals free

164 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

and exterior, with one interior petal crowded closely
against the axis, thus—
Oo
a
aa

Here, then, the two external petals will be saved,
exactly as the one external sepal was saved in the
case of the calyx; and these two petals are repre-
sented by the very small white lodicules under the
_ outer pale in our existing wheats and grasses. On the
other hand, the inner petal, jammed in between the
grain and the inner pale (with the stem at its back),
has been utterly crushed out of existence, partly
because of its very small size, partly because of its
functional uselessness, and partly because it had no
other part with which to coalesce, and so to save itself
as the inner sepals had managed to do. Moreover, it
must be remembered that the sepals do still perform
a useful service in protecting the young flower before
it opens, and in keeping out noxious insects during
the kerning or swelling of the grain ; whereas the
lodicules or rudimentary petals are now apparently
quite functionless ; and so we may congratulate our-
selves that they are there at all, to preserve for us
the true ground-plan of the floral architecture in
grasses. Indeed, they have not survived by any
means in all grasses: among the smaller and more

The Origin of Wheat. 165

degraded kinds they are often wholly wanting, having
been quite crushed out between the calyx and the
grain. It is only the larger and more primitive types
that still exhibit. them in any great perfection. On
the other hand, one group of very large exotic grasses,
the bamboos, has three regular petals, thus clearly
showing the descent of the family as a whole from
rush-like ancestors, and also obviously suggesting
that the obsolescence of the inner petal in the other
grasses is due to their small size and their closely
packed minute flowers.

Among the stamens, one-sidedness has not notably
established itself; for in wind-fertilised plants they
must necessarily hang out freely to the breeze, and
therefore they do not get much crowded between the
other parts. A few grasses still even retain their
double row of stamens, having six to each floret ; but
most of them have only one whorl of three. In some
of the lower and more degraded forms, however, even
the stamens have lost their trinary order, and only |
two now survive. This is the case in our own very .
degenerate little sweet-vernal-grass, the plant which
imparts its delicious fragrance to new-mown hay.
But in the cereals and in most other large species the
three stamens still remain in undiminished effective-

ness to the present day.

166 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

Finally we come to the most important part of all,
the ovary. This part, alternating with the stamens,
has the same arrangement of styles relatively to the
axis as in-the case of the petals; and it has under-
gone precisely the same sort of abortive distortion.
The two outer styles, hanging freely out of the calyx,
have been preserved like the two outer lodicules; but
the inner one, pressed between the grain and the
inner pale (with the stem behind it) has been simply
crushed: out of existence, like its neighbour the inner
lodicule.

Thus the final result is that the whole inner por-
tion of the flower (except as regards stamens) has
been distorted or rendered abortive by close pressure
against the’ stem (due to the crowding of the florets
in the spiky form), while the whole outer portion
remains normal’ and fully developed. We have
an outer. pale- representing a single normal sepal,
and an ‘inner pale representing two dwarfed and
united sepals ; we have two normal outer lodicules
or petals, and a blank where the inner petal ought to
be ; we have three stamens, symmetrically arranged,
among the faithless faithful only: found; and we
have ‘finally two normal outer styles, with a
blank in ‘place of the absent inner style: The
accompanying diagram, compared with that of the

The Origin of Wheat. 167

primitive monocotyledon (fig. 32), will make this
perfectly clear,

Fic. 40.—Diagram of Wheat flower.

Here, 2! represents the outer pale or normal sepal,
while -¢? and a3 represent the inner pale composed of ~
the two united sepals. Again, 5' and 2? stand for the
two lodicules or surviving petals, while 6? marks the
place of the lost petal, now found in the bamboos
alone. The stamens are lettered c', ,and c3. The
two existing styles are shown by d! and a’, while @
marks the abortive inner style, now not even present
in a rudimentary condition. It will be observed at
once that all the outer side is normal, and all the inner
side more or less abortive through pressure against
the axis. .

Thus it will be seen that the line of links which

168 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

connects the grasses and cereals with the lilies is
absolutely unbroken, and that it consists throughout
of one continuous course of degradation. At the same
time, by this one-sided and spiky arrangement, the
grasses secured for themselves an exceptional advan-
tage in the struggle for existence. No other race of
small wind-fertilised plants could compete with them
for the possession of the open wind-swept plains ; and
over all these they spread far and wide, rapidly dif-
ferentiating themselves into a vast number of divergent
genera and species, each adaptively specialised for
some peculiar habitat, soil, or climate. At the present
time, the grasses number their kinds by thousands;
they extend over the whole world from the poles to
the equator; and they form the general sward or
carpet of greenery over by far the larger portion of the
terrestrial globe. Even in Britain alone, with our poor
little insular flora, a mere fragment of that belonging to
the petty Eurepean continent, we number no less than
forty-two genera of grasses, distributed into more than
one hundred species. In fact, what may fairly be
called degradation from one point of view may fairly
be called adaptation from another. The organisation
of the grasses is certainly lower than that of the lilies,
but it fits them better for that station of life to which
it has pleased nature to assign them.

The Origin of. Wheat. 169

The various kinds of grasses differ very little from
_ one another in general plan ; the flower in’ almost all
is constructed strictly on the lines above mentioned ;
and the leaves in almost all are just the same soft
pensile blades, making them into the proper green
sward for open, unwooded, wind-swept plains. But
like almost all other very dominant families, they
have split up into an immense number of kinds, dis-
tinguished from one another by minute differences in
the arrangement of the florets and the spikelets ; and
. these kinds have again subdivided into more and more
minutely different genera and species. One great
group, with panicies of a loose character, and very
degraded spikelets, has given origin to many southern
grasses, from some of which the cultivated millets are
derived. Another great group, with usually more
spiky inflorescence, has given origin to most of our
northern grasses, from some of which the common
cereals are derived. This second group has again split
up into several others, of which the important one
for our present purpose is that of the Hordeinez, or
barley-worts. From one of the numerous genera into
which the primitive Hordeinee have once more split
up, our cultivated barleystake their rise ; from another,
which’ here demands further attention, we get our
cultivated wheats. a 7 es

170° Flowers and their Pedigrees.

The nearest form to true wheat now found wild in
the British Isles is the creeping couch-graés,a perennial
closely agreeing in all essential particulars of structure
with our cultivated annual wheats. But in the south
European region we find in abundance a large series
of common wild annual grasses, forming the genus
fEgilops of technical botany, and exactly resembling
true wheat in every point except the size of the grain. .
One species of this genus, Aégilops ovata, a small, hard,
wiry annual, is now pretty generally recognised among
botanists as the parent of our cultivated corn. There
was a good reason, indeed, why primitive man, when
he first began to select and rudely till a few seeds for
his own use, should have specially affected the grass
tribe. No other family of plants has seeds richer in
starches and glutens, as indeed might naturally be
expected from the extreme diminution in the number
of seeds to each flower. On the other hand, the flowers
on each plant are peculiarly numerous ; so that we get
the combined advantages of many seeds, and rich seeds,
so seldom to be found elsewhere except among the
pulse family. The experiments conducted by the Agri-
cultural Society in their College Garden at Cirencester
have also shown that careful selection will produce large
and rich seeds from A®gilops ovata, considerably re-
sembling true wheat, after only a few years’ cultivation

The Origin of Wheat. 171

Primitive man, of course, did not proceed nearly
so fast as that. Of the very earliest attempts at cul-
tivation of Aégilops, all traces are now lost, but we
can gather that its tillage must have continued in
some unknown western Asiatic region for some time
before the neolithic period; for in that period we
find a rude early form of wheat already considerably
developed among the scanty relics of the Swiss lake
dwellings. The other cultivated plants by which it
is there accompanied, and the nature of the garden
weeds which had followed in its wake, point back to
Central or Western Asia as the land in which its tillage
had first begun. From that region the Swiss lake
dwellers brought it with them to their new home
among the Alpine valleys. It differed much already
from the wild A®gilops in size and stature; but at
the same time it was far from having attained the
stately dimensions of our modern corn. The ears
found in the lake dwellings are shorter and narrower
than our own; the spikelets stand out more hori-
zontally, and the grains are hardly more than half the
size of their modern descendants. The same thing is
true in analogous ways with all the cultivated fruits
or seeds of the stone age: they are invariably much
smaller and poorer than their representatives in exist-
ing fields or gardens. From that time to this the

i972 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

process of selection and amelioration has been constant
and unbroken, until in our own day the descendants
of these little degraded lilies, readapted to new func-
tions under a fresh régime, have come to cover almost
all the cultivable plains in all civilised countries, and
supply by far the largest part of man’s food in
Europe, Asia, America, and Australia.

A Mountain Tulip. 173

VI.
A MOUNTAIN TULIP.

THE path up from the Llyn to the crest of Mynydd
Mawr leads for some distance along the mossy,
boulder-strewn course of a mountain torrent, which
takes its rise in a fairy spring close below the actual
summit of the craggy peak. It is a stiff pull for fair-
weather pedestrians, this almost untrodden tourist
trackway, with here and there a hand-and-knee
clamber over great glacier-marked bosses of solid
granite ; but the exquisite glimpsés we get at every
fresh spur over the bare shoulders of Moel Siabod
and into the cleft valley of the upper Conway more
than compensate for the rough stony walking and the
obvious damage to one’s nether integuments. Very
* few casual beaten-road visitors ever find out ‘these
lonely footpaths up the less-frequented mountains ;
the mass takes its circular tour round the regulation
road by Llanberis, Beddgelert, and Capel Curig,
leaving Mynydd Mawr and its neighbouring Carnedds

174 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

out in the cool shade of popular neglect. So much
the better for those wandering naturalists who love

Fic. 41.—Lloydia serotina
(Mountain Tulip).

to ramble among unhack-
neyed scenes, and to spy
out wild nature in all her
native loveliness, an Arte-
mis who only bares her
beauty among the deepest
and most secret recesses of
glade or woodland. -
Here by the bank of the
tiny torrent, where I shall
stop and rest on a smooth
stretch of naked rock for a
few idle minutes, there is
beauty enough in all ‘con-
science to charm the spell-
bound eyes of any intrusive
Actzon. The moist fis-
sures of the water-worn

granite are richly clad with filmy fronds of alpine
ferns; the drier crevices among the tumbled rocks
are tufted with the black stems and graceful foliage
of the maidenhair spleenwort ; and the scanty alluvial
mould on the slopes beyond is carpeted by lithe
creeping sprays of beautiful branching clubmoss. All

A Mountain Tulip. | 175

around me, a wealth of luxuriant mountain vegeta-
tion covers the peaty soil of the hollows, or the
shallow granitic clay washed down into the crannies
from the weathering crags above. There are insect- |
eating sundews, with their clammy red-haired leaves
inclosing the half-digested bodies of a dozen tiny
flies, whose attention they have falsely attracted with
their delusive show of pretended honey. There are
equally deceptive butterworts, with tall scapes of
bright blue blossoms, and with pale yellowish-green
foliage curled tightly round their mouldering victims
in a deadly embrace. There are Alpine saxifrages,
unfolding their pretty pinky-white flowers to the
eager advances of the - fertilising bees. And here
amongst them all, in a sheltered nook of the inclosing
granite débris, is the great prize of the day, the wee
slender mountain tulip, in search of which I have come
out this breezy morning, and whose actual home on
the side of Mynydd I hardly expected to light upon
so easily or so quickly in the upward march.

Of course I was told beforehand exactly where to
look for it by the torrent’s brink ; for our botanists
have long ago so thoroughly overhauled every inch
of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, in search
of specimens, that every individual station for every
rare British plant is perfectly well known to them,

176 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

and printed in minute detail in half a dozen British
floras. But I feared that here our little mountain
tulip might be quite extinct already, exterminated by
the too pressing attention of its numerous dilettante
admirers ; for as soon as your average collector finds
a last lingering relic of some moribund British race
on down or moorland, his first notion is to complete
its destruction by rooting up the one remaining in-
dividual as a unique specimen, to become a permanent
record of his luck and skill in the brown paper
treasuries of his own herbarium. We, however, are
naturalists of another kidney, I trust : we will observe
and examine our little treasure carefully on the spot,
but we will not pull it up ruthlessly, bulb and all,
or press’ its pretty blossoms under a dead weight
of books and drying paper, in order to preserve its
miserable mummy in the wretched cemetery of a
hortus siccus. Long may it flourish on its native hill-
side, and may no scientific hand ever grub it up as
the cruel. trophy of a specimen-slaughtering raid!
Indeed; to be perfectly frank, like the canny Scot who
was ‘no thot sure of Jocky,’ I have not trusted even
my ‘readers themselves with the exact secret of my
tulip’s whereabouts. I will confess that I have in-
vented the name of Mynydd Mawr on purpose to
deceive, and I have led up to the summit by a round-

A Mountain Tulip. 177

‘about path through the glen of Conway in order to
‘prevent any future intruder from retracing his steps
‘without me, and annexing for his own private aggran-
disement the pretty flower whose life I have so chival-
rously and humanely spared. When we come to
learn the history of its race, I feel sure every one will
sympathise in the sentiment which makes me wish
to preserve this solitary colony of Alpine flowers as
‘long as possible from the desecrating hands of the
abandoned plant-collector.

’ First, let us look exactly what manner of lily it
réally is, and then we will go on to unravel together
the clues and tokens of its romantic history. See, it
is a little simple grass-like plant, sending forth from
‘its buried bulb two or three very slender blades’ by
way of leaves; and from their midst springs a
graceful bending stem, surmounted by a single star-
shaped white blossom. At least, it looks white: at
first sight, though when you come to examine it more
closely you can observe three red lines running down
the face of each petal, and converging on a small bright
-golden spot at their base. Those lines are in fact
choney-guides for the mountain insects, pointing them
the’ shortest road to the sweets stored up in ‘the
nectaries, and so saving them any extra trouble in
looking: about for their morning’s meal. On the other

178 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

hand, the insects repay the flower for its honey by
carrying pollen from blossom to blossom, and so
enabling the plant to set its seed. Of course, unless
the young capsule in the centre of each blossom is
thus fertilised by pollen from one of its neighbours,
it never ripens. into a seed-bearing fruit at all; and,
indeed,.in the economy of the plant itself, the sole
object of the blossom, with its bright petals, its store
of honey, and its faint perfume (almost imperceptible
to any save very delicate senses), is simply to induce
the bee or the butterfly thus to convey the fertilising
powder from one head of flowers to another of the
same sort.

Our little plant has of course a botanical name of
‘the usual clumsy kind ; but in this particular instance
there is a certain rough fitness in its application, for
being a Welsh lily by nature it is duly known by a
Latinised Welsh name as Lloydia. Now, I am not
going this morning to inquire fully into the whole
past history of the original family from which it
springs—that would be too long a subject for an off-
hand lecture as I sit here basking on the bare granite
slope ; I propose only entering in any detail into the
last chapter of its chequered career, and asking how

_it has managed to keep its foothold for so many ages
in this one spot and on a few neighbouring Snow-

A Mountain Tulp. 179

donian summits. But before we go into that final
question we must just begin, by way of preparatory
exercise, with a very brief account of its earlier origin.
Lioydia serotina, then, to give it the full benefit of its
Latinised name, is a mountain plant of northern and
Arctic Europe, as well as of the chillier portions of
Siberia and British North America. Further south,
it is found only in the colder upland shoulders of the
Alps, the Caucasus, and the Altai range, as well as in
a few other great snowy mountain systems; but in
Britain it occurs nowhere except on one or two of the
higher mountains here in North Wales. By origin, it
is a very early and simple offshoot of the great lily
tribe ; one of the most primitive lilies, indeed, now
existing on the face of the earth. Like all others of
that vast family, it has six petals and six stamens or
pollen-bearing sacs ; but it still retains a very early
form of lily flower in its open star-shaped blossom
as well as in one or two other smaller peculiarities.
The cultivated tulips of our gardens, varieties of a
wild Levantine species, are all descended from a
somewhat similar form ; but with them the course of
development has gone much further ; the petals have
grown far larger and more conspicuous, in order to
allure the eyes of bigger southern insects, and the
general form of the flower has become bell-shaped

180 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

instead of star-shaped, in order to ensure more safe and
certain fertilisation by these winged allies; for in a
tubular blossom the pollen is much more likely to be
brushed off from the insect’s head on to the proper
portion of the unripe capsule than in an open spread-
ing flower like our Lloydia here. Hence we may
fairly say that Lloydia represents an early ancestral
form from which the modern and more southerly
tulips are nature’s enlarged and improved varieties.
But how did these pretty little white lilies get
here, and why do they still remain here in their early
simple form, while their southern sisters elsewhere
‘have. been slowly modified into brilliant yellow bell-
shaped tulips? Thereby hangs a most curious and
delightful tale. For I have very little doubt that the
ancestors of our’ pretty lilies here have been growing
uninterruptedly in the present spot for many thou-
sands of years, and that during all that time they
have gone @n reproducing themselves by seed from
time to time, without once having crossed their stock
with any of their congeners iri the Arctic regions or
in ‘the great snowclad ranges of central Europe.
Indeed, I very much doubt whether they have ever
even intermarried with their neighbours on the other
Snowdonian summits, for I think I shall be able to
show good reasons for believing that each of these

A Mountain Tulip. 181

little isolated colonies has lived on for ages all by
itself on each of their three scattered peaks in the
North Welsh district.

It is a curious fact, certainly, that one should find
a single species of Arctic flower reappearing at such
long distances in such isolated spots under closely
similar circumstances. If we go to the great snow-
clad stretches of land which extend around the
Arctic Circle in Europe, Asia, and America, we shall
everywhere find our little lily growing in abundance
close up to the line of perpetual snow, though its
diverse habitats are there divided by wide expanses
of open sea. If, again, we cross the whole of the
German plains, we shall see no Lloydias in the inter-
vening tract ; but when we reach the Alps and the
Pyrenees, we shall a second time come upon other
isolated colonies of the self-same flower. Once more,
we may turn eastward, and we shall meet with it, after
along march, among the Carpathians and the Cau-
casus ; or we may turn westward, and then we shall
light upon it again on the craggy sides of a few soli-
tary Welsh mountains. How does it come that in
every cold tract we find the self-same species recur-
ring again and again wherever the circumstances are
fitted for its growth ? and how have its seeds or bulbs
been conveyed across such wide stretches of inter-

182 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

vening sea or valley to so many distinct and separate
chilly regions ?

One obvious answer might be, that under similar
conditions a like flower had everywhere been de-
veloped’ from some common plant of lowland or
temperate districts. But in reality such absolute
similarity of independent development never actually
occurs in nature, for the various Lloydias are not
merely rather like one another, but are actually one
and the same species, as like each other (to quote our
old Welsh friend Fluellin) ‘as my fingers is to my
‘fingers.’ Now, naturalists know that such absolute
identity of structure can only arise through unbroken
descent from a common origin ; wherever two species
are separately descended from unlike ancestors, how-
ever close their analogies may be, they are always at
once marked off from one another by some very
obvious points of structural dissimilarity. Nor can
we suppose that the seeds of the Lloydia have been
transported from one place to another by mere
accident, clinging to the legs of Arctic bitds, or
carried unwittingly on the muddy heels of globe-
trotting tourists. Such accidents do indeed occa-
sionally occur, and they account for the very frag-
mentary manner in which remote Oceanic islands like
the Azores or St. Helena are peopled by waifs and

A Mountain Tulip. 183

strays from the fauna and flora of all neighbouring
continents. But as we have already seen in the con-
verse case of the hairy spurge, it would be incredible
that such an accident should have occurred over and
over again in a hundred separate cases, so that every
suitable place in the whole northern hemisphere
should separately, by mere luck, have received a
distinct colony of appropriate cold-climate. plants.
Incredible, I should say, even if the instance of the
_ Lloydia stood alone without any analogues ; but in
fact, as I shall try to point out by-and-by, it is only
one instance out of a thousand that might be quoted ;
for every Arctic land and every snow-clad Alpine peak
_ is covered close up to the limit of vegetation with
"dozens or hundreds of similar plants, insects, and
animals, which are nowhere found in all the inter-
vening temperate or lowland regions. Clearly all
these coincidences cannot be due to mere accident ;
we must seek for their reason in some single and
common fact. |

See this great rounded block of smooth granite
on whose solid shoulders I am now sitting; how
wonderfully grooved and polished it is, with. long,
deep, rounded furrows running lengthwise across its
face in the same direction as the general dip of thé
Conway valley. What can have made those curious

184 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

parallel channels on its naked surface, I wonder?
Any one who has ever looked closely at the rocks
about the foot of a glacier in Switzerland will recog-
nisc at once what was the agency at work on the
granite slopes of Mynydd Mawr. Those are most
undoubtedly ice-marks, caused by the long, slow,
grinding action of the superincumbent glaciers. For
.of course everybody knows nowadays that there was
_once a time when great glacial sheets spread over
the combes and glens of Snowdonia, as they spread
to-day over the nants of Chamounix and the buried
basin of the Mer de Glace,

Dr. Croll’s calculations have shown that the astro-
nomical conjunction necessary for the production of
such a state of things must have occurred some two
hundred thousand years since; and from that date
down to eighty thousand years ago our planet kept
presenting alternately either pole to the sun during
Jong cycles* of 10,500 years each; so that, first, the
northern hemisphere enjoyed a long summer, while
the southern was enveloped for a vast distance from
the Antarctic Circle in a single covering sheet of ice;
and then again the southern hemisphere had its
lengthened spell of tropical weather, while the north
was turned into one enormous Greenland down as
far as the British Isles. Eighty thousand years ago,

A Mountain Tultp. 185

or thereabouts, this condition of things began to
change ; the climate of the north became more genial ;
and ever since that date our sober planet has oscil-
lated within gentler limits, producing only such alter-
nate results of annual summer and winter as those
with which we ourselves are now familiar. .
When the glaciation was at its worst in the
northern hemisphere, almost the entire surface of the
European continent, from Scandinavia and Lapland,
to England, Belgium, and central Germany, lay buried
beneath one unbroken sheet of permanent ice. But
when the conditions were a little less severe, local
glaciers radiated from the chief mountain bosses of
Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man, and ground
_ these deep grooves and scratches on the worn surface
‘of the denuded rock: At length the climate began
to mend slightly ; and then the plants and animals of
the Arctic zone spread uninterruptedly over the whole
of northern Europe, from the limit of pack-ice to at
least the southern slope of the Alps on the Italian
side. Remains of these glacial animals—Arctic lem-
mings, musk. sheep, white hares, reindeers, Alpine
marmots, and snowy owls—are still found among the
bone-caves and river drift of the interglacial ages in
various parts of Europe, from Scandinavia to the

Tuscan-grottoes. At the same time we may be pretty
9

186 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

sure that high Arctic or Alpine plants, adapted toa
chilly climate, like the saxifrages, the sibbaldia, the
crowberry, and the Swiss veronica, spread over all
the plains and valleys of Great Britain and the neigh-
bouring continent.

In those days, we saw good reason to believe when
we were examining the stranded southern flora of
Cornwall and Devonshire, England and Ireland were
united to one another as well as to France and Hol-
land by a broad belt of lowland occupying what is
now the bed of the two channels and the German
Ocean, so that the mammoth and the cave-bear could
roam uninterruptedly from the Yorkshire hills to the
rock-shelters of the Dordogne, and from the bogs of
Connaught to the then ice-clad summits of the Hartz
and the Jura. The dark hunters of the period, who
framed the rough, chipped stone hatchets of the
Abbeville drift and the beautiful flint arrowheads of
the souther:f French caves, could in like manner range
without let or hindrance from Kent’s Hole at Torquay
to the Schwatka cavern in Moravia, and from. the
honeycombed cliffs of Yorkshire valleys to the lime-
stone grottoes among the Alpine slopes. That distri-
bution of land and water easily accounts for the dis-
persion of Arctic and. snow-line plants or animals
over all the snowy regions of northern Europe.

A Mountain Tulip. | 187

But as the cold began to subside, and as a warmer
fauna and flora invaded the now milder plains and
_valleys of central Europe, the glacial types, being less
adapted to the new conditions, began to retreat north-
ward towards the Arctic Circle, or upward towards the
chilly summits of the principal mountains. Slowly,
age after age, the southern plants and animals overran
all the. lower -portions of the continent, cutting the
glacial fauna and flora in two, and established them-
selves as far as the outlying peninsula of Britain,
which still continued to form an integral part of the
European mainland. After most of the Germanic

. types had made good their foothold even in this dis-
tant region, however, and after the still more southern
poeonies of the Steep Holme and the rock-cistus of
Torquay had established themselves under the lee of
the Cornish and Kerry mountains, on the submerged
tract which then stretched out far to the west of the
Scilly Islands, the land began to sink slowly toward
sea-level ; and at last an arm of the Atlantic encir-
cled the whole of Ireland, and still later the waters of
two long gulfs which now form the English Channel
and the North Sea met together-by bursting through
the narrow barrier of chalk between Dover and Cape
Blancnez. Thus Britain finally became an island
group ; and, being washed on three sides by the warm

188 Flowers and ther Pedigrees.

v
current of the Gulf Stream, it acquired an unusually

high and equable temperature for a district situated so
far to the north and rising into so many chains of low
mountains. But not all the plants and animals which
inhabit the continent had had time to reach England,
which has a comparatively poor fauna and flora ; while
still more failed to get to Ireland before the separation ;
and so, the Irish flora contains a larger proportion of
Spanish and Portuguese types, while the mass of the
English flora, especially in the eastern half of the
island, is essentially Germanic.

Even after this change to more genial conditions,
however, many of the Arctic plants, though now
separated by wide stretches of sea or land from their
nearest relatives elsewhere, managed to keep up a
vigorous existence in the Scotch Highlands, the Welsh
hills, and the greater summits of the Lake district.
Some of them still cover vast tracts of country in the
north; as, fér example, the little green sibbaldia, a
tufted Arctic trailer, whose herbage forms a chief
element of the greensward in many parts of the
Highlands ; or the pretty eight-petalled dryas, which
stars with its sweet white blossoms the limestone
rocks of northern England ‘and the Ulster hills.
Among the more common of these isolated old glacial
flowers in Britain are the Alpine meadow-rue, the

A Mountain Tulp. 189

northern rock-cress, the Arctic whitlow-grass, the
Alpine pearlwort, the Scottish asphodel, the mossy
cyphel, the mountain lady’s mantle, the purple saxi-
frage, and the red bearberry. Altogether, we have
still more than two hundred such Alpine or Arctic
plants, stranded among our uplands or in the extreme
north of Scotland, and probably separated for many
thousand years from the main body of their kind in
the Arctic Circle or the snowy mountains of central
Europe.

Our pretty little Lloydia here is far rarer in Britain
than these low mountain kinds ; for it has died out
utterly even in Scotland itself, and now survives no-
where with us except on these solitary Welsh summits.
Such cases are frequent enough in Britain; for while
the moderate mountainous or Arctic species still go
on thriving among the straths and corries, the coldest
kinds of all have often been pushed upward and ever
upward by the advancing tide of southern flowers till
they are left at last only on a few isolated mountain
tops, where many of them are even now in course of
slowly disappearing before the steady advance of the
southern types. For example, there is a certain pretty
kind ‘of heath, confined to northern or Arctic hillsides, _
which till lately lingered on in Britain only on the one
mountain known as the Sow of Athole in Perthshire ;

190 ~° Flowers and their Pedigrees.

but of late years ‘it has grown rarcr and rarer with
each succeéding summer, until it’ is now probably
quite extinct. It is the natural tendency of all such
small isolated colonies, whether of plants or animals,
to die slowly out; for they cannot cross freely with
any of their own kind outside the narrow limits
of their own restricted community; and by con-
stantly breeding in and in with one another they.
at last acquire such weak- and feeble constitu-
tions that they finally dwindle away imperceptibly
for want of a healthy infusion of fresh external
blood.

If I mention a few other like cases (as well as I

x

can remember them on the spur of the moment, for I
cannot ‘pretend to give a complete ex-cathedré list
here on the slopes of Mynydd Mawr) it will help to
elucidate the origin and nature of this little colony of
mountain tulips. ' There is a lovely orchid, the lady’s
slipper, commion in Siberia and Russia, almost up to
the Arctic Circle, but now found with us only in one
Yorkshire station, where, like the Perthshire heath, it
is rapidly verging to complete local extinction. Again,
“among one family alone, the tufted saxifrage has now
been driven to the summits of Ben Avers and Ben
Nevis ; the drooping saxifrage is extinct everywhere
in Britain save on the cloudy top of Ben Lawers; the

A Mountain Tulip. I9I

brook ‘saxifrage lingers on upon the same moun-
tain, as well as on Ben Nevis and Lochnagar ; and the

Fic. 42.—Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium calceolius).

Alpine saxifrage, though more frequent in little solitary
groups in Scotland and the Lake district, has died out

192 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

of all Ireland save only on the bald head of Ben Bulben
in Sligo. The Alpine sow-thistle, an Arctic and
snowy weed, is now dying out with us on the tops of
Lochnagar and the Clova mountains. The black bear-
berry yet haunts Ben Nevis and a few other Highland
peaks. The Alpine butterwort has been driven even
from the mountains in Scotland generally, but still
drags on a secluded existence in a few very northern
bogs of Caithness and Sutherland ; in this respect it
resembles the northern holy-grass, an Arctic plant,
which Robert Dick, the self-taught botanist of Thurso,
discovered among the high pastures near his native
town. This same grass strangely reappears in New
Zealand, whither it has doubtless been carried from
Siberia by its seeds accidentally clinging to the feet
of some belated bird ; but then such a solitary case in
itself shows how impossible is the explanation of the
numerous Scotch and Welsh Arctic plants as due to
mere chance® for while in north European mountains
similar instances can be counted by hundreds, in New
Zealand the coincidence is very rare and almost
unparalleled. |

The snowy gentian, to continue our list, turns up
in a good many little Scotch colonies ; but the Alpine
lychnis, its companion on the mountain pastures of
the Bernese Oberland, is only now known in Britain

A Mountain Tulip. 193

on the summit of Little Kilrannoch, a Forfarshire
mountain, and among the crags of Hobcartin Fell in
Cumberland. The bog sandwort, everywhere a rare
and dying species, has wholly disappeared from these
islands except on the sides of the Widdybank Fell in
Durham. Its ally the fringed sandwort loiters late on
the limestone cliffs of Ben Bulben in Sligo, as well as
on one solitary serpentine hill in the island of Unst
among the chilly Shetlands. A tiny pea-flower, the
Alpine astragalus, has been driven almost everywhere
to the snow-line, but still survives in Scotland among -
the Clova and Braemar mountains. It is on a single
spot in the same exposed Clova range, too, that the
closely related yellow oxytrope still grows in diminish-
ing numbers ; while its ally the Ural oxytrope holds
its own manfully over all the dry hills of the High-
lands. I could add to these instances many more ;
but lunch is waiting to be eaten in the knapsack, and
I am loth to tire the patience of my hearers with too
long a list of barren names and bare wind-swept
mountain summits.

Still, I love to think that the little colony of timid
shrinking Lloydias stranded here on the granite slopes
of Mynydd Mawr can push back its pedigree in such
an unbroken line to so dim and distant a prehistoric
past. Ever since the glaciers last cleared away from

194. Flowers.and their Pedigrees.

this boss of smooth stone on whose broad back we
are sitting, a tiny group of our pretty mountain tulips
has continuously occupied age after age this self-same
spot. Originally, no doubt, they covered the whole
sides of the mountains and stretched down far into
the plains and valleys ; but gradually, as the world’s
weather grew warmer, they were restricted, first, to
the mountain tracts of Wales and Scotland, then to a
small. Snowdonian district, and finally, even within
that shrunken realm, to two or three isolated peaks.
Occasionally, I suppose, a seed from one of the three
existing Welsh colonies may. be carried by accident
into the territory of the others ; but it is in the highest
degree improbable that the stock has ever been rein-
forced for the last fifty thousand years from any purely
external body of its congeners in the higher Alps or
in the Arctic regions, .The dark small men of the
neolithic age, the Aryan Celts of the bronze period,
the conqueriné Roman from the south, the English-
man, the Scandinavian, the: Norman, all. have since
come, and most of them have gone again ; but the
Lloydias still hold precarious possession of their soli-
tary remaining strongholds. An analogy from the
animal world will help to bring out the full strange-
ness.of this extraordinary isolation. Mount Washing-
ton in New Hampshire. is the highest peak among

A Mountain Tultp. 195

the beautiful tumbled range of the White Mountains.
On and near its summit a small community of butter-
flies belonging to an old Glacial and Arctic species
still lingers over a very small area, where it has held its
own for the eighty thousand years that have elapsed
since the termination of the great ice age. The actual
summit of the mountain rises to a height of 6,293 feet;
and the butterflies do not range lower than the five
thousand feet line—as though they were confined on
Snowdon to a district between the Ordnance cairn and
the level of the little slumbering tarn of Glasllyn.
Again, from Mount.Washington to Long’s Peak in
Colorado, the distance amounts to 1,800 miles ; while
from the White Mountains to Hopedale in Labrador,
where the same butterflies first reappear, makes a bee-
line of fully a thousand miles, In the intervening
districts there are no insects of the same species.
Hence we must conclude that the few butterflies left
behind by the retreating main-guard of their race on
that one New Hampshire peak have gone on for
thousands and thousands of years, producing eggs
and growing from caterpillars into full-fledged insects,
without once effecting a cross with the remainder of
their congeners among the snows of the Rocky Moun-
tains or in the chilly plains of sub-Arctic America.
So far as they themselves know, they are the only

196 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

representatives of their kind now remaining on the
whole earth, left behind like the ark on Ararat amid
the helpless ruins of an antediluvian world. Well,
what these Mount Washington butterflies are among
insects, that are our pretty wild tulips here among
English flowers, They remain to us as isolated relics
of an order that has long passed away ; and they help
us to rebuild with fuller certainty the strange half-un-
deciphered history of the years that were dead and
gone long before written books had yet begun to be.

A Family History. . 197

VIL
A FAMILY HISTORY.

ALTHOUGH the roses, like many other highly respect-
able modern families, cannot claim for themselves any
remarkable antiquity—their tribe is only known, with

Fic. 43.—Common Cinquefoil.

certainty, to date back some three or four millions of
years, to the tertiary period of geology—they have
yet in many respects one of the most interesting and

198 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

instructive histories among all the annals of English
plants, In a comparatively short space of time they
have managed to assume the most varied forms ; and
their numerous transformations are well attested for
us by the great diversity of their existing representa-
tives. Some of them have produced extremely beau-
tiful and showy flowers, as is the case with the cultivated
roses of our gardens, as well as with the dog-roses,
the sweet-briars, the may, the blackthorn, and the
meadow-sweet of our hedges, our copses, and our
open fields. Others have developed edible fruits, like
the pear, the apple, the apricot, the peach, the nectar-
ine, the cherry, the strawberry, the raspberry, and the
p'um ; while yet others again, which are less service-
able to lordly man, supply the woodland birds or even
the village children with blackberries, .dewberries,
cloudberries, hips, haws, sloes, crab-apples, and rowan-
berries. Moreover, the various members of the rose
family exhibit®almost every variety of size and habit,
from the creeping silver-weed which covers our road-
sides or the tiny alchemilla which peeps out from the
crannies of our walls, through the herb-like meadow-
sweet, the scrambling briars, the shrubby hawthorn,
and the bushy bird-cherry, to the taller and more
arborescent forms of the apple-tree, the pear-tree, and
the mountain ash. And since modern science teaches

A Family History. ~ 199

us that all these very divergent plants are ultimately
descended from a single common ancestor—the prim-
zval progenitor of the entire rose trike—whence they
have gradually branched off in various directions,
owing to separately slight modifications of structure
and habit, it is clear that the history of the roses must
really be one of great interest and significance from
the new standpoint of evolution. I propose, therefore,
here to examine the origin and development of
the existing English roses, with as little technical
detail as possible; and I shall refer for the most part
only to those common and familiar forms which, like
the apple, the strawberry, or the cabbage rose, are
already presumably old acquaintances of all my
readers.

The method of our inquiry must be a strictly
genealogical one. For example, if we ask at the
present day whence came our own eatable garden
plums, competent botanists will tell us that they are
a highly cultivated and carefully selected variety of
the common sloe or blackthorn. It is true, the sloe
is a small, sour, and almost uneatable fruit, the bush
on which it grows is ‘short and trunkless, and its
branches are thickly covered with very sharp stout
thorns ; whereas the cultivated plum is borne upon
a shapely spreading tree, with no thorns, and a well-

200 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

marked trunk, while the fruit itself is much larger,
sweeter, and more brightly coloured than the ancestral
sloe. But these changes have easily been produced
by long tillage and constant selection of the best
fruiters through many ages of human agriculture. So,
- again, if we ask what is the origin of our pretty old-
fashioned Scotch roses, the botanists will tell us in
like manner that they are double varieties of the wild
burnet-rose which grows beside the long tidal lochs of
the Scotch Highlands, or clambers over the heathy
cliffs of Cumberland and Yorkshire. The wild form
of the burnet-rose has only five simple petals, like
our own common sweet-briar; but all wild flowers
when carefully planted in a rich soil show a tendency
to double their petals; and, by selecting for many
generations those burnet-roses which showed this
doubling tendency in the highest degree, our florists
have at last succeeded in producing the pretty Scotch
roses which ‘nay still be found (thank Heaven!) in
many quiet cottage gardens, though ousted from
fashionable society by the Marshal Niels and Gloires
de Dijon of modern scientific horticulturists.

Now, if we push our inquiry a step further back,
we shall find that this which is true of cultivated
plants in their descent from wild parent stocks, is
true also of the parent stocks themselves in their.

A Family History. 201

descent from an earlier common ancestor. Each of
them has been produced by the selective action of
nature, which has favoured certain individuals in the
struggle for existence, at the expense of others, and
has thus finally resulted in the establishment of new
species, having peculiar points of advantage of their
own, now wholly distinct from the original species
whose descendants they are. Looked at in this
manner, every family of plants or animals becomes a
sort of puzzle for our ingenuity, as we can to some
extent reconstruct the family genealogy by noting
in what points the various members resemble one
another, and in what points they differ among them-
selves. To discover the relationship of the various
English members of the rose tribe to each other—
their varying degrees of cousinship or of remoter
community of descent—is the object which we set
before ourselves in the present paper.

Perhaps the simplest and. earliest type of the rose
family now remaining in England is to be found in
the little yellow potentillas which grow abundantly in
ill-kept fields or by scrubby roadsides. The poten-
tillas are less familiar to us than most others of the
rose family, and therefore I am sorry that I am
obliged to begin by introducing them first to my
reader’s notice rather than some other and older

202 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

acquaintance, like the pear or the hawthorn. But as
they form the most central typical specimen of the
rose tribe which we now possess in England, it is
almost necessary to start our description with them,
just as in tracing a family pedigree we must set out
from the earliest recognisable ancestor, even though
he may be far less eminent and less well-known than
many of-his later descendants. For to. a form very
much like the potentillas all the rose family trace
their descent. The two best known species of poten-
tilla are the goose-weed or silver-weed, and the cinque-
foil. Both of them are low creeping herb-like weeds,
with simple bright yellow blossoms about the size of
a strawberry flower, having each five golden petals,
and bearing a number of small dry brown seeds on a
long green stalk. At first sight a casual observer
would hardly take them for roses at all, but a closer
view would show that they resemble in all essential
particulars af old-fashioned single yellow rose in
miniature. From some such small creeping plants as
these all the roses are probably descended. Observe,
I do not say that they are the direct offspring of the
potentillas, but merely that they are the offspring of
some very similar simple form. We ourselves do not
derive our origin from the Icelanders ; but the Ice-

' See fig. 43.

A Family History. . 203

x

landers keep closer than any other existing people
to that primitive Teutonic and Scandinavian stock
from which we and all the other people of north-
western Europe are descended. Just so, the roses
do not necessarily derive their origin from the poten-
tillas, but the potentillas keep closer than any other
existing rose to that. primitive rosaceous stock
from which all the other members of the family are
descended.!
The strawberry is one of the more developed
plants which has varied least from this early type
represented by the cinquefoil and the silver-weed.
There is, in fact, one common English potentilla,
whose nature we have already considered, and which
bears with village children the essentially correct and
suggestive name of barren strawberry, This particular
potentilla differs from most others of its class in hav-
ing white petals instead of yellow ones, and in having”
three leaflets on ‘each stalk instead of five or seven.
When it is in flower only it is difficult at first sight to
distinguish it from the strawberry blossom, though
the petals are generally smaller, and the whole flower
less widely opened. After blossoming, however, the

1 All the potentillas have a double calyx, which certainly was not
the case with the prime ancestor of the roses, or else the whole tribe
would still retain it.

204 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

green bed or receptacle on which the little seeds ' are
seated does not swell out (as in the true strawberry)
into a sweet, pulpy, red mass, but remains a mere dry
stalk for the tiny bunch of small hard inedible nuts,
The barren strawberry, indeed, as we saw in an earlier
‘paper, is really an intermediate stage between the
other potentillas and the true eatable strawberry ; or,
to put it more correctly, the eatable strawberry is a
white-flowered potentilla which has acquired the habit
of producing a sweet and bright-coloured fruit instead
of a few small dry seeds. Since we have got to
understand the vadzonale of this first and simplest
transformation, we have now a clue by which we may
interpret almost all the subsequent modifications of
the rose family, and I must therefore be permitted
here briefly to recapitulate the chief points we have
already proved in this matter.

The true strawberry, we saw, resembles the barren
strawberry iff every particular except in its fruit. It
is a mere slightly divergent variety of that particular
species of potentilla, though the great importance of
the variety from man’s practical point of view causes
us to give it a separate name, and has even wrongly

1 Botanically and structurally these seeds, as we always call them,
are really fruits; but the point is a purely technical one, with which it

is quite unnecessary to bore the reader. I only mention it here to
anticipate the sharp eyes of botanical critics.

A Family History. 205

induced botanists to place it in a separate genus all
by itself. In reality, however, the peculiarity of the
fruit is an extremely slight one, very easily brought
about. In all other points—in its root, its leaf, its
stem, its flower, nay, even its silky hairs—the straw-
berry all but exactly reproduces the white potentilla.
It is nothing more than one of these potentillas with
a slight diversity in the way it forms its fruit. To
account, therefore, for the strawberry we had first to
account for the white potentilla from which it springs.

The white potentilla, or barren strawberry, you
will remember, is itself a slightly divergent form of
the yellow potentillas, such as the cinquefoil. From
these it differs in three chief particulars. In the first
place, it. does not creep, but stands erect ; this is due
to its mode of life on banks or in open woods, not
among grass and meadows as is the case with the
straggling cinquefoil. In the second place, it has
‘three leaflets on each stalk instead of five, and this is
a slight variation of a sort liable to turn up at any
time in any plant, as the number of leaflets is very
seldom quite constant. In the third place, it has
white petals instead of yellow ones, and this is the
most important difference of any. All flowers with
bright and conspicuous petals we know are fertilised
by insects, which visit them in search of ‘honey or

206 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

pollen, and the use of the coloured petals is, in fact,
to attract the insects and to induce them to fertilise
the seeds. Now, yellow seems to have been. the
original colour of the petals in almost all (if not
absolutely in all) families of flowers; and the greater
number of potentillas are still yellow. But different
flowers are visited and fertilised by different insects,
and as some insects like one colour and some another,
many blossoms have acquired white or pink or purple
petals in the place of yellow ones, to suit the particular
taste of their insect friends. In tracing the upward
course of development in the roses, we shall see that
they follow the ordinary law of progressive chromatic
changes : the simpler types are yellow ; the somewhat
higher ones are white ; the next pink ; and the highest
in this particular family are red; for no rose has yet
attained to the final stage of all, which is blue. The
colours of petals are always liable to vary,-as we all
see in our gaydens, where florists can produce at will
almost any shade or tint that they choose ; and when
wild flowers happen to vary in this way, they often
get visited by some fresh kind of insect which fertilises
their ‘seeds better than the old ones did; and so in
time they set up a new variety or a new species.
Two of our English potentillas have thus acquired
white flowers to suit their proper flies, while one

A Family History. 207

boggy species has ‘developed purple petals to meet
the zsthetic requirements of the marsh-land_ insects.
No doubt the white blossoms of the barren straw-
‘berry are thus due to some original ‘sport’ or acci-
dental variation, which. has been perpetuated and
become a fixed habit of the plant because it gave it
a better and surer chance of setting its seeds, and so
of handing down its peculiarities to future genera-
tions.

And now, how did we find the true strawberry
had developed from the three-leaved white potentilla ?
Here the birds came in to play their part, as the bees
and flies had done in producing the white blossom.
Birds are largely dependent upon fruits and seeds for
their livelihood, and so far as they are concerned it
does not matter much to them which they eat. But
from the point of view of the plant it matters a great
. deal. For if a bird eats and digests a seed, then the
seed can never grow up to bea young plant; and it
has so far utterly failed of its true purpose. If, how-
ever, the fruit has a hard indigestible seed inside it
(or, in the case of the strawberry, outside it), the
plant is all the better for the fact, since the seed will
not be destroyed by the bird, but will merely be dis-
persed by it, and so aided in attaining its proper
growth. Thus, if certain-potentillas happened ever

208 = Flowers and their Pedigrees.

to swell out their seed receptacle into a sweet pulpy
mass, and if this mass happened to attract birds, the
potentillas would gain an advantage by their new
habit, and would therefore quickly develop into wild
strawberries as we now get them. But the difference.
between the strawberry fruit and the potentilla fruit
is to the last a very slight one: Both have a number
of little dry seeds seated on a receptacle; only, in
the strawberry the receptacle grows red and succu-
lent, while in the potentilla it remains small and
stalk-like. The red colour and sweet juice of the
strawberry serve to attract the birds which aid in dis-
persing the seed, just as the white or yellow petals
and the sweet honey of the potentilla blossoms serve
to attract the insects which aid in fertilising the

flowers. In this way all nature is one continual
round of interaction and mutual dependence between
the animal and vegetable worlds.

The potefttillas and the strawberry plant are all of
them mere low creeping or skulking herbs, without
woody stems or other permanent branches. But
when we get to the development of the brambles or
blackberry bushes, we arrive at a higher and more
sespectable division of the rose family. There aré
two or three intermediate forms, such as water-avens
and herb-bennet—tall, branching, weedy-looking

A Family History. 209

roadside plants—which help us to bridge over the
gulf from the one type to the other. Indeed, even
the strawberry and the cinquefoil have a short

Fic. 44.—Fruit of Bramble.

perennial, almost woody stock, close to the ground,
from which the annual branches spring ; and in some
other English weeds of the rose family the branches

Fic. 45.—Flower of Bramble.

themselves are much stiffer and woodier than in these
creeping plants. But in the brambles, the trunk and

boughs have become really woody, by the deposit of
10

210 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

hard material in the cells which make up their sub- .
stance. Still, even the brambles are yet at heart
mere creepers like the cinquefoil. They do not grow
erect and upright on their own stems: they trail and
skulk and twine in and out among other and taller
bushes than themselves. The leaves remain very
much of the cinquefoil type ; and altogether there is
a good deal of the potentilla left in the brambles even
now. ,

However, these woody climbers have certainly
some fresh and more developed peculiarities of their
own. They are all prickly shrubs, and the origin of
their prickles is sufficiently simple. Even the poten-
tillas have usually hairs on their stems; and these
hairs serve to prevent the ants and other honey-thiev-
ing insects from running up the stalks and stealing
the nectar intended for fertilising bees and butterflies.
Similar hairs in the goose-grass grew, you will re-
collect, into the little clinging hooks of the stems and
midribs. But in the brambles, hairs of the same sort
have grown still thicker and stouter, side by side with
the general growth in woodiness of the whole plant ;
so that they have at last developed into short thorns,
which serve to protect the leaves and stem from herbi-
vorous animals. As a rule, the bushes and weeds
which grow in waste places are very apt to be pro-

A Family History. . 211

tected in some such fashion, as we see in the case of
gorse, nettles, blackthorn, holly, thistles, and other
‘plants ; but the particular nature of the protection
varies much from plant to plant. In the brambles it
takes the form of stiff prickly hairs ; in the nettles, of
stinging hairs ; in the gorse, of pointed leaves ; and
in the thorn-bushes of short, sharp, barren branches.:
Another peculiarity of the bramble group is their
larger white flowers and their curious granulated fruit.
The flowers, of course, are larger and whiter in order
to secure the visits of their proper fertilising insects ;
the fruits are sweet and coloured in order to attract
the hedgerow birds. Observe, too, that the flowers
being higher in type than those of the strawberry, are
often tinged with pink: here we get the first upward
step in the direction of the true roses. The nature of
the fruit in the raspberry, the blackberry, and the
dewberry, again,’ is quite different from that of the
strawberry. Here, instead of the receptacle swelling
out and growing red and juicy, it is the outer coat
of the separate little seeds themselves that forms the
eatable part ; while the receptacle remains white and
inedible, being the ‘hull’ or stem which we pick out
from the hollow thimble-like fruit in the raspbeiry.
Each little nut, which in the strawberry was quite
hard and brown, is here covered with a juicy black or

g12 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

red pulp, inside which lies the stony real seed ; so
that a blackberry looks like a whole collection of tiny
separate fruits, run together into asingle head. More-
over, there are other minor differences in the berries
themselves, even within the bramble group ; for while
the raspberry and cloudberry are red, to suit one set
of birds, the blackberry and dewberry are bluish black,
to suit another set ; and while the little grains hold
together as a cup in the raspberry, but separate from
the hull, they cling to the hull in the other kinds.
Nevertheless, in leaves, flower, and fruit there is a very
close fundamental agreement among all the bramble
kind and the potentillas. Thus we may say that the
brambles form a small minor branch of the rose family,
which has first acquired a woody habit and a succulent
fruit, and has then split up once more into several
smaller but closely allied groups, such as the black-
berries, the raspberries, the dewberries, and the stony
brambles.

The true roses, represented in England by the
dog-rose and sweet-briar, show us a somewhat dif-
ferent development from the original type. They, too,
have grown into tall bushes, less scrambling and more
erect than the brambles. They have leaves of some-
what the same sort, and prickles which are similarly
produced by the hardening of sharp hairs upon the

A Family History. 213

stem. But their flowers and fruit are slightly more
specialised—more altered, that is to say, for a par-
ticular purpose from the primitive plan. In the first
place, the flowers, though still the same in general
arrangement, with five petals and many stamens and
carpels (or fruit-pieces), have varied a good deal in
detail. The petals are here much larger, and they
-- have advanced to the stage of a brilliant pink ; while
the blossoms are also sweet-scented. These pecu-

AN wee
“an ai

\(

Fic. 46.—Vertical section of a Dog-rose.

liarities of course serve to attract the bees and other
large fertilising insects, which thus carry pollen from
head to head, and aid in setting the seeds much more
securely than the little pilfering flies. Moreover, in
all the roses, the outer green cup which covers the
blossom in the bud has grown up around the little
seeds or fruit-pieces, so that instead of a ball turned
outward, as in the strawberry and raspberry, you get,

214 Fiowers and their Pedigrees.

as it were, a bottle turned inward, with the seeds on
the inner side. After flowering, as the fruit ripens,
this outer cup grows round and red, forming the hip
or fruit-case, inside which are to be found the separate
little hairy seeds. Birds eat this dry berry, though
we do not, and thus aid in dispersing the species.
But though they digest the soft red outer pulp, formed
by the swollen stalk, they cannot digest the hairy
seed, so the plant attains its prime object of getting
them duly scattered. The true roses, then, are another
branch of the original potentilla stock, which have
acquired a bushy mode of growth, with a fruit differing
in construction from that of the brambles. Our Eng-
‘lish kinds are merely pink ; the more developed exotics
are often scarlet and crimson.

We have altogether some five true wild roses in
Britain. The commonest is the dog-rose, which
everybody knows well; and next comes the almost
equally familfar sweet-briar, with its delicately scented
glandular leaves. The burnet-rose is the parent of
our cultivated Scotch roses, and the two other native
kinds are comparatively rare. Double garden roses
are produced from the single five-petalled wild varie-
ties by making the stamens (which are the organs for
manufacturing pollen) turn into bright-coloured petals,
There is always more or less of a tendency for stamens

A Family History. 215

thus to alter their character; but in a wild state it
never comes to any good, because’ such plants can
never set seed, for want of pollen, and so die out in a
single generation. Our gardeners, however, carefully
select these distorted individuals, and so at length
produce the large, handsome, barren flowers with
which we are so familiar. The cabbage and moss
roses are monstrous forms thus bred from the common
wild French roses of the Mediterranean region; the
China roses are cultivated abortions from an Asiatic
species ; and most of the other garden varieties are
artificial crosses between these or various other kinds,
obtained by fertilising the seed vessels of one bush
with pollen taken from the blossoms of another ofa
different sort. To a botanical eye, double flowers,
however large and fine, are never really beautiful,
because they lack the order and symmetry which
appear so conspicuously in the five petals, the clus-
tered stamens, and the regular stigmas of the natural
form. ,

From the great central division of the rose family,
thus represented by the potentillas, the strawberry,
the brambles, and the true roses, two main younger
branches have divérged much more widely in different
directions. As often happens, these junior offshoots
have outstripped and surpassed the elder stock in

216 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

many points of structure and function. The first of
the two branches in question is that of the plum-tribe ;
the second is that of the pears and apples. Each
presents us with some new and important modifica-
tions of the family traits.

Of the plum tribe, our most familiar English
examples, wild or cultivated, are the sloe or black-
thorn, with its descendant the garden plum ; as well
as the cherry, the apricot, the peach, the nectarine,
and the almond. All these plants differ more or less
conspicuously from the members of the central group
which we have so far been examining in their tree-
like size and larger trunks. But they also differ in
another important point: each flower contains only
one seed instead of many, and this seed is inclosed in
a hard bony covering, which causes the whole plum
tribe (except only the almond, of which more anon)
to be popularly included under the common title
of ‘stone-fruit8.’ In most cases, too, the single seed
is further coated with a soft, sweet, succulent pulp,
making the whole into an edible fruit. What, now,
is the reason for this change? What advantage did
the plant derive from this departure from the ordinary
type of rose-flower and rose-fruit? To answer this
question we must look at one particular instance in
detail, and we cannot do better than take that well-

A Family History. 217

known fruit, the cherry, as our prime example of the
whole class.

The cherry, like the strawberry, is an eatable
fruit. But while in the strawberry we saw that the
pulpy part consisted of the swollen stalk or recep-
tacle, in which several small dry seeds were lousely
embedded, with the cherry the pulpy part consists of
the outer coat of the fruit or seed vessel itself, which
has grown soft and juicy instead of remaining hard
and dry. In this respect the cherry resembles a
single grain from a raspberry; but from the raspberry,
again, it differs in the fact that each flower produces
only a single solitary one-seeded fruit, instead of pro-
ducing a number of little fruits, all arranged together
in a sort of thimble. In the raspberry flower, when
blossoming, you will find in the centre several separate
carpels or fruit-pieces; in the cherry you will find
only one. The cherry, in fact, may (so far as its fruit
is concerned) be likened to a raspberry in which all
the carpels or fruit-pieces except one have become
aborted. And the reason for the change is simply
this: cherry bushes (for in a wild state they are
hardly trees) are longer-lived plants than the bramble
kind, and bear many more blossoms on each bush.
Hence one seed to every blossom is quite as many as
they require to keep up the numbers of the species.

218 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

Moreover, their large and attractive fruits are much
more likely to get eaten and so dispersed by birds
than the smaller and less succulent berries of ‘the
brambles. Furthermore, the cherry has a harder
stone around each seed, which i$ thus more effectually
protected against being digested, and the seed itself
consists of a comparatively big kernel, richly stored
with food-stuffs for the young plant; which thus starts
‘relatively well equipped in the battle of life. For all
these reasons the cherries are better off than the
brambles, and therefore they can afford to produce
fewer seeds to each flower, as well as tc make the ©
coverings of these seeds larger and more attractive to
birds. Originally, indeed, the cherry had two kernels
in each stone, and to this day. it retains two little
embryo kernels in the blossom, one of which is usually
abortive afterwards (though even now you may some-
times find two, as in philipcena almonds) ;, but one
seed being omfinarily quite sufficient for all practical
purposes, the second one has long since ‘Gleappeates
in the vast majority of cases. ”

The plum scarcely differs from the cherry? in: any-
thing important except the colour, size, and shape of
the fruit. It is, as we have already noted, a cultivated
variety of the blackthorn, in which the bush has be-
come.a tree, the thorns have been eradicated, and the

A Family History. | 219

fruit has been immensely improved by careful selec-
tion. The change wrought in these two wild bushes
by human tillage shows, indeed, how great is the
extent to which any type of plant can be altered by
circumstances in a very short time. The apricot is
vet another variety of the same small group, long
subjected to human cultivation in the East.

Peaches and nectarines differ from apricots mainly’
in their stones, which are wrinkled instead of being
smooth ; but otherwise they do not seriously diverge
from the other members of the plum tribe. Indeed,
though botanists rank the apricot as a plum, because
of its smooth stone, and put the peach and nectarine
in a genus by themselves, because of their wrinkled
coating, common sense shows us at once that it would
be much easier to turn an apricot into a peach than to
turn a plum into an apricot. There is one species of
nectarine, however, which has undergone a very curious
change, and that is the almond. Different as they
appear at first sight, the almond must really be re-
garded as a very slightly altered variety of nectarine.
Its ‘outer shell or husk represents the pulpy part of the
nectarine fruit ; and indeed, if you cut in two a young
unripe almond and a young unripe nectarine, you
will find that they resemble one another very closely.
But as they ripen the outer coat of the nectarine

220 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

grows juicier, while that of the almond grows stringier
“and coarser, till at last the one becomes what we
commonly call a fruit, while the other becomes what we
commonly call a nut. Here, again, the reason for the
change is not difficult to divine. Some seeds succeed
best by making themselves attractive and trusting to
birds for their dispersion; others succeed best by
adopting the tactics of concealment, by dressing
themselves in green when on the tree, and in brown
when on the ground, and by seeking rather to evade
than to invite the attention of the animal world.
Those seed vessels which aim at the first plan we
know as fruits ; those which aim rather at the second
we know as nuts. The almond is just a nectarine
which has gone back to the nut-producing habit.
The cases are nearly analogous to those of the straw-
‘berry and the potentilla, only the strawberry is a fruit
developed from a dry seed, whereas the almond is a
dry seed developed from a fruit. To some extent
this. may be.regarded as a case of retrogressive evolu-
tion or degeneration.

The second great divergent branch of the rose
family—that of the pears and apples—has proceeded
towards much the same end as the plums, but in a
strikingly different manner. The apple kind have
grown into trees, and have produced fruits. Instead,

A Family History. 221

however, of the seed vessel itself becoming soft and
succulent, the calyx or outer flower covering of the
petals has covered up the carpels or young seed
vessels even in the blossom, and has then swollen out
into a sort of stalk-like fruit. The case, indeed, is
again not unlike that of the strawberry, only that
here the stalk has enlarged outward round the flower
and inclosed the seeds, instead of simply swelling

ae Fic. 47.—Vertical section of Apple-blossom.
into a boss and embedding them. In the hip of the
true roses we get some foreshadowing of this plan,
except that in the roses the seeds still remained sepa-
rate and free inside the swollen stalk, whereas in the
pear and apple the entire fruit grows into a single solid
mass. Here also, as before, we can trace a gradual
development from the bushy to the tree-like form.
The common hawthorn of our hedges shows us,
perhaps, the simplest stage in the evolution of the
apple tribe. It grows only into a tall bush, not

222 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

unlike that of the blackthorn, and similarly armed
with stout spines, which are really short sharp
branches, not mere prickly hairs, as in the case of the
brambles. Occasionally, however, some of the haw-
thorns develop into real trees, with a single stumpy
trunk, though they never grow to more than mere
small spreading specimens of the arboreal type, quite
unlike the very tall and stately pear-tree. The
flowers of the hawthorn—may-blossom, as we gener-
ally call them—are still essentially of the rose type ;
but, instead of having a single embryo seed and
simple fruit in the centre, they have a compound
fruit, inclosing many seeds, and all embedded in the
thick fleshy calyx or flower-cup. As the haw ripens
the flower-cup outside yrows redder and juicier, and
the seed pieces at the same time become hard and
bony. For it is a general principle of all edible
fruits that, while they are young and the seeds are
unripe, they “remain green and sour, because then
they could only be losers if eaten by birds; but as
the seeds ripen and become fit to germinate, the pulp
grows soft and sweet, and the skin assumes its bright
hue, because then the birds will be of service to it by
diffusing the mature seeds. How largely birds assist
in thus dispersing plants has very lately been proved
in Australia, where a new and troublesome weed has

A Family History. 223

rapidly overrun the whole country, because the fruit-
eaters. are very fond of it, and scatter its seeds broad-
cast over the length and breadth of the land.

The common medlar is nothing more than a haw-
thorn with a very big overgrown haw. In the wild
state it bristles with hard thorns, which are wanting
to the cultivated form, and its flower almost exactly
- resembles that of the may. The fruit, however, only
becomes edible after it begins to decay, and the bony
covering of the seeds is remarkably hard. It seems
probable that the medlar, originally a native of southern
Europe, is largely dispersed, not by birds, but by
mice, rats, and other small quadrupeds. The colour
is not particularly attractive, nor is the fruit particu-
larly tempting while it remains upon the bush ; but
when it falls upon the ground and begins to rot, it may
~ easily be eaten by rodents or pigs, and thus doubtless
it procures the dispersion of its seeds under conditions
highly. favourable to their proper growth and success
in life. E
The little Siberian crabs, largely cultivated for
their fruit in America, and sometimes found in Eng-
lish shrubberies as. well, give.us one of the earliest
and simplest forms of the real apple group. In’some
respects, indeed, the apples are even simpler than
the hawthorn, because their seeds or pips are not

224 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

inclosed in bony cases, but only in those rather tough
leathery coverings which form what we call the core.
The haw of the hawthorn may be regarded as a very
small crab-apple, in which the walls of the seed cells
have become very hard and stony; or the crab may be
‘regarded as a rather large haw, in which the cell walls
still remain only thinly cartilaginous. The flowers
of all the group are practically identical, except in size, -
and the only real difference of structure between them
is in the degree of hardness attained by the seed covers.
The crabs, the apples, and the pears, however, all grow
into tallish trees, and so have no need for thorns or
prickles, because they are not exposed to the attacks
of herbivorous animals. Ordinary orchard apples are,
of course, merely cultivated varieties of the common
wild crabs. In shape the apple-tree is always spread-
ing, like an arboreal hawthorn, only on a larger scale.
The pear-tree differs from it in two or three small
points, of Which the chief are its taller and more
pyramidal form, and the curious tapering outline of
the fruit. Nevertheless, pear-trees may be found of
every size and type, especially in the wild state, from
a mere straggling bush, no bigger than a hawthorn,
to a handsome towering trunk, not unlike an elm or
an alder.

In the matter of fruits, the apple group are more

A Family History. 225

advanced than the roses, but so far as regards the
flower alone, viewed as an organ for attracting insects,
many of the apple tribe are inferior to the true roses.
Here again, however, we can trace a regular gradation
from the small white blossoms of the may, through
.the larger blushing pink flowers of the apple, to the
very expanded and brilliant crimson petals of that
béautiful ornamental species of pear, the Pyrus japon-
. ica,'so often trained on the sunny walls of cottages.
The quince is another form of apple very little
removed from its congeners except in the fruit.
-More different in external appearance is the moun-
tain-ash or rowan-tree, which few people would take
atfirst sight for a rose at all. Nevertheless, its
. flowers exactly resemble apple-blossom, and its pretty
red berries are only small crabs, dwarfed, no doubt,
by its love for mountain heights and bleak windy
situations, and clustered closely together ‘into large
. drooping bundles. For the same reason, perhaps,
its leaves have been split up into numerous small
- leaflets, which causes it to have been popularly
regarded as a sort of ash. In the extreme north, the
rowan shrinks to the condition of a stunted shrub;
but in deep rich soils and warmer situations it rises
_ into a pretty and graceful tree. The berries are
eagerly eaten by birds, for whose attraction most

226 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

probably they have developed their beautiful scarlet
colour.

So far, all the members of the rose family with
which we have dealt have exhibited a progressive
advance upon the common simple type, whose em-
bodiment we found in the little wayside potentillas.
Their flowers, their fruits, their stems, their branches,
have all shown a regular and steady improvement, a
constant increase in adaptation to the visits of insects
or birds, and to the necessities for defence and pro-
tection. I should be giving a false conception of
evolution in the roses, however, if I did not briefly
illustrate the opposite fact of retrogressive develop-
ment or degeneration which is found in some mem-
bers of the class; and though these members are
therefore almost necessarily Jess familiar to us,
because their flowers and fruits are inconspicuous,
_ while their stems are for the most part mere trailing
creepers, I fhust find room to say a few words about
two. or three of the most noteworthy cases, in order
to complete our hasty review of the commonest rosa-
ceous tribes. For, as we all know, development is
not always all upward. Among plants and animals
there are usually some which fall behind in the race,
and which manage nevertheless to eke out a liveli-
hood for themselves in some less honourable and

A Family History. | 227

distinguished position than their ancestors. About
these black sheep of the rose family I must finally
say a few words.

In order to get at them, we must go back once
more to that simple central group of roses which
includes the potentillas and the strawberry. These
plants, as we saw, are mostly small trailers or creepers
among grass or on banks ; and they have little yellow
or white blossoms, fertilised by the aid of insects. In
most cases their flowers, though small, are distinct
enough to attract attention in solitary arrangement.
There are some species of this group, however, in
which the flowers have become very much dwarfed,
so that by themselves they would be quite too tiny
~ to allure the eyes of bees or butterflies. This is the
case among the meadow-sweets, to which branch also
~ the spirzeas of our gardens and conservatories belong.
Our common English meadow-sweet has close trusses
of numerous small whitish or cream-coloured flowers,
thickly clustered together in dense bunches at the
end of the stems ; and in this way, as well as by their
powerful perfume, the tiny blossoms, too minute to
attract attention separately, are able to secure the
desired attentions of any passing insect. In their
case, as elsewhere, union is strength. The foreign
spirzeas cultivated in our hothouses have even smaller

228 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

separate flowers, but gathered into pretty, spiky
‘antler-like branches, which’ contrast admirably with
the dark green of the foliage, and so attain the
requisite degree of conspicuousness. This habit of
clustering the blossoms which are individually dwarfed
and stunted may be looked upon as the first stage of
degradation in the roses. The seeds of the meadow-
sweet are very minute, dry, and inedible. They show
no special adaptation to any particular mode of ad-
vanced dispersion, but trust merely to chance as they
drop from the dry capsule upon the ground beneath.
A far deeper stage of degradation is exhibited by
the little salad-burnet of our meadows, which has lost
the bright petals of its flowers altogether, and has
taken to the wasteful and degenerate habit of fertili-
sation by means of the wind. We can understand the
salad-burnet better if we look first ‘at common agri-
mony, another little field weed about a foot high, with
which most country people are familiar ; for, though
agrimony is not itself an example of degradation, its
arrangement leads us on gradually to the lower types.
It has a number of small yellow flowers like those of
the cinquefoil ; only, instead of standing singly on
separate flower stalks, they are all arranged together
on a common terminal spike, in the same way as in a
hyacinth or a gladiolus. Now, agrimony is fertilised by

. 2
A Family, Firstory. 229

insects, and therefore, like most other small field roses,
it has conspicuous yellow petals to attract its winged
allies. But the salad-burnet, starting from a some-
what similar form, has undergone a good deal of
degradation in adapting itself to wind-fertilisation.
It has a long spike of flowers, like the agrimony ; but
these flowers are very small, and, are closely crowded
together into a sort of little mophead at the end of the

Fic. 48.—Single flower of Salad Burnet, male and female.

stem. They have lost their petals, because these were
no longer needed to allure bees or butterflies, and: they —
retain only the green calyx or flower-cup, so that the
whole spike looks merely a bit of greenish vegetation,
and would never be taken for a blossoming head by
any save a botanical eye. The stamens hang out on
long thread-like stems from the cup, so that the wind
may catch the pollen and waft it to a neighbouring
head ; while the pistils which it is to, fertilise have

230 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

their sensitive sutface divided into numerous little
plumes or brushes, so as readily to catch any stray
pollen grain which may happen to pass their way.
Moreover, in each head, all the upper flowers have
pistils and embryo seed vessels only, without any
stamens ; while all the lower flowers have stamens and
pollen bags only, without any pistils. This sort of
division of labour, together with the same arrange-
ment of seed-bearing blossoms above and _ pollen-
bearing blossoms below, is very common among wind-
fertilised plants, and for a very good reason. If the
stamens and pistils were inclosed in a single flower
they would fertilise themselves, and so lose all the
benefit which plants derive from a cross, with its con-
sequent infusion of fresh blood. If, again, the stamens
were above and the pistils below, the pollen from the
stamens would fall upon and impregnate the pistils,
thus fertilising each blossom from others on the same
plant—a p¥an which is hardly better than that of self-
fertilisation. But when the stamens are below and
the pistils above, then each flower must necessarily be
fertilised by pollen from another plant, which ensures
in the highest degree the benefits to be derived from
a cross.

‘Thus we see that the salad-burnet has adapted
itself perfectly to its new mode of life. Yet that

A Family History. “2 $1

adaptation is itself of the nature of a degradation,
because it is a lapse from a higher to a lower grade
of organisation—it is like a civilised’ man taking to
a Robinson Crusoe existence, and dressing in fresh
skins. Indeed, so largely has the salad-burnet lost
the distinctive features of its relatives, the true roses,
that no one but a skilled ‘botanist would ever have
guessed it to be a rose at all, In outer appearance it
is much. more like the little flat grassy plantains
which grow as weeds by every roadside ; and it is
only a minute consideration of its structure and
analogies which can lead us to recognise it as really
and essentially a very degenerate and inconspicuous
rose. Yet its ancestors must once have been true
roses, for all that, with coloured petals and all the .
rosaceous characteristics, since it still retains many
traces of its old habits even in its modern degraded
form.

- We have in England another common weed, very
like the salad-burnet, and popularly known as stanch-
wound, or great-burnet, whose history is quite as
interesting as that of its neighbour. The stanch-
- wound is really a salad-burnet which has again lost
its habit-of depending upon the wind for fertilisation,
and has reverted to the earlier insect-attracting tactics
of the race. As it had already lost its petals, how-

\

232 flowers and their Pedigrees.

ever, it could not easily replace them, so it has coloured
its calyx or flower-cup instead, which answers exactly
the same purpose. In other words, having no petals,
it has been obliged to pour the purple pigment with -
which it allures its butterfly friends into the part
answering to the green covering of the salad-burnet.
It has a head of small coloured blossoms, extremely
like those of the sister species in many respects, only
purple instead of green. Moreover, to suit its new

Fic 49.—Flower of Stanch-Wcund or Great Burnet.

habits, it has its cup much more tubular than that of
the salad-burnet ; its stamens do not hang out to the
wind, but are inclosed within the tube ; and the
pistil has its sensitive surface shortened into a little
sticky knob instead of being split up into a number
of long fringes or plumes. All these peculiarities of
course depend upon its return from the new and bad
habit of wind-fertilisation. to the older and more
economical plan of getting the pollen carried from

A Family History. 269

head to head by bees or butterflies. The two flowers
grow also exactly where we should expect them todo.
The salad-burnet loves dry and wind. swept pastures
or rocky hill-sides, where it has free elbow-room to
shed its pollen to the breeze ; the stanch-wound takes
rather to moist and rich meadows, where many insects
are always to be found flitting about from blossom to
blossom of the honey-bearing daisies or the sweet-
scented clover.

Perhaps it may be asked, How do I know that the
salad-burnet is not descended from the stanch. wound,
rather than the stanch-wound from the salad-burnet ?
At first sight this might seem the simpler explana-
tion of the facts, but I merely mention it to show
briefly what are the sort of grounds on which such
questions must be decided. The stanch-wound is
certainly a later development than the salad-burnet ;
and for this reason—it has only four stamens, while
the parent plant has several, like ali the other roses.
Now, it would be almost impossible for the flower
first to lose the numerous stamens of the ordinary
rose type, and then to regain them anew as occasion
demanded. It is easy enough to lose any part or organ,
but it:is a very different thing to develop it over again.
Thus the great-burnet, having once lost its petals, has

never recovered them, but has been obliged to colour
11

234 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

its calyx instead. It is much more natural, therefore,
.to suppose that the stanch-wound, with its few sta-
mens and its clumsy device of a coloured calyx
instead of petals, is descended from the salad-burnet,
than that the pedigree should run the other way ; and
there are many minor considerations which tend in the
same direction. Most correctly of all, we ought perhaps
to say that the one form is probably a descendant of
ancestors more or less like the other, but that it has
lost its ancestors’ acquired habits of wind-fertilisation,
and reverted to the older methods-of the whole tribe.
Still, it has not been able to replace the lost petals,

I ought likewise to add that there are yet other
roses even more degenerate than the burnets, such as
the little creeping parsley-piert, a mere low moss-like
‘plant, clinging in the crannies of limestone rocks or
growing on the top of earthy walls, with tiny green
petal-less flowers, so small that they can hardly be
distinguisHfed with the naked eye. These, however, I
‘cannot now find space to describe at length ; and,
indeed, they are of little interest to anybody save the
professional botanist. But I must just take room to
mention that if I had employed exotic examples as
well as the familiar English ones, I might have
traced the lines of descent in some cases far more fully.
At is perhaps better, however, to confine our attention

A Family History, 235

to fairly well-known plants, whose peculiarities we can
all carry easily in our mind’s eye, rather than to over-
load the qucstion with technical details about un-’
known or unfamiliar species, whose names convey no
notion at all to an English reader, When we con-
sider, too, that the roses form only one family out of
the ninety families of flowering plants to be found in
‘England alone, it will be clear that such a genealogy
as that which I have here endeavoured roughly to
sketch out is but one among many interesting plant
‘pedigrees which might be easily constructed on evolu-
tionary principles. Indeed, the roses are a compara-
tively small group by the side of many others, such
as the pea-flowers, the carrot tribe, and the dead-
‘nettles. Thus, we have in England only forty-five
~ species of roses, as against over two hundred species
of the daisy family. Nevertheless, I have chosen the
rose tribe as the best example of a genealogical study
‘of plants, because most probably a larger number of
roses are known to unbotanical readers than is the
case with any other similar division of the vegetable

world.

236 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

VIII.
CUCKOO-PINT:

CLOSE by the hedge-side there runs a little streamlet
known to the village children for two miles around. by
the strangely pleonastic title of the Bourne Brook.
Pleonastic, I say, because bourne is, of course, good
old English for what in modern English we call a
brook, so that the two halves of the common name
are, in fact, synonymous, the later word being added
to the earlier by the same sort of unconscious redupli-
cation as that which gives us the double forms. of
Windermere Lake or Mount Ben Jerlaw. Ican’t tell
you, though, what a world of life and interest is to
be found among the low cliff banks and tiny shingle
patches that bound the Bourne Brook. In the stream
itself there are darting crayfish, which we can catch
with our fingers by lifting up the green slimy stones ;
there are caddis-worms, and big pond snails, and pout-
ing miller’s thumbs, and iridescent stickleback ; it is
even rumoured, though I doubt whether on sufficient

' A lecture delivered at the Midland Institute, Birmingham,

Cuckoo- Pint. 237

authority, that there are actually and positively in
some of its pools and stickles genuine unadulterated
real livetrout. I know as a fact, however, that there
are fresh-water mussels, for these I have fished up

Fic. go. —Cuckoo-Pint (Arum Maculatum).

with my little dredging-net, and safely domesticated
in the bell-glass aquarium. In the fields around there
are ferns, and marsh-marigolds, and rushes, and roast-
beef plants. And beside the water’s edge there are

238 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

abundant leaves and blossoms of that strange flower
the cuckoo-pint, whose counterfeit presentment you
see in the figure on the previous page. Now,
cuckoo-pint, or lords-and-ladies, or wild arum, which-
ever you choose to call it, is a very singular plant in-
deed ; and it seems to me we cannot do better than
sit down and dissect one for the sake of understanding
its queer internal arrangements. If it were a newly
discovered Central African lily, we should all be read-
ing about its extraordinary adaptations in all the news-
papers: much more then, since it isa common English
plant we have all known familiarly from childhood
upward, ought we to wish for some explanation of its
singular shape and its wonderful devices for entrap-
ping and intoxicating helpless little flying insects.
First of all, we must begin by recognising that the
apparent flower of the cuckoo-pint is not one single
~ blossom, but a whole group of separate blossoms,
closely crowded together in two or three little distinct
bundles on a long spike or succulent stem. And in
order to let us all clearly understand the meaning and
nature of the entire compound structure, I think we
had better divide our subject (as if it wére a sermon)
into three heads. First, we must consider what are
the actual parts to be distinguished from one another
in the-flower of the cuckoo-pint at the present day.

Cuckoo-Pint. 239

Secondly, we must ask what-was the course of evolu-
tion by which they each assumed those peculiar forms.
And thirdly, we must inquire what good purpose in
the economy of the plant is subserved Ly each part in
the existing cuckoo-pints as we now find them. We
shall thus have learnt, at last, what a
cuckoo-pint is, how it came to be so,
and why its various portions have been
brought to assume their present forms.
Beginning, then, with the purely
structural or positive arrangement of the —
cuckoo-pint as we find it in nature at
the present day, we see at once that
its: blossom consists mainly of a large
greenish-purple sheath or hood, at the
top of a long stalk, inciosing a tall
fleshy spike or club, shaped something
like a mace, and protruding from the
hood in front, so as to show its

coloured and expanded summit above

FIG. 5r.
the point of junction of the two lips, Spadix of Arum.

That is all that one can see of the blossom from

the outside; but in reality these two conspicuous
organs form no part. of the actual and genuine
flowers themselves at all. They are merely inci-
dental accessories, put there for an excellent pur-

240 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

pose indeed, as everything always is in the balanced
economy of nature; but not essential or necessary to
the existence of the flowers as flowers, though most
noticeable from their size and hue to the superficial
eyes of the unscientific human kind. In order to see
the true flowers themselves, we must cut open the side
of the hood or sheath, as has been done in the accom-
panying diagram, and then one can observe a number
of small knobby bodies clustering in three groups
along the lower part of the club-shaped spike or cen-
tral axis. Those little knobby bodies, of which there
are a great many in each arum, form the real blossoms
of the cuckoo-pint ; aid they are inclosed in the
sheathing hood for a very good reason, as we shall
hereafter see, in order to ensure the carrying out of
their proper function, the final production of seeds and
berries. ,

If one looks closely at the diagram, however, one
can notice tat these little knobby flowers are not all
quite similar to one another. They consist of three
distinct kinds, all three of which are always found in
true arums of this type. At the bottom there are a
whole group of small cushion-like green lumps, each
with a little point in its centre, and all closely packed
together in several irregular rows, like Indian corn on
the cob. These green lumps are the pistil-bearing

+ Cuckoo-Pint. 241

flowers ; each of them represents a single very de-
graded blossom, and each will grow out at a later stage
into one of the bright scarlet berries which form such
beautiful objects in the hedgerow and waysides during
the autumn months. We could not possibly have a
simpler type of flower than these lowest pistil-bearing
blossoms ; they are in fact the central floral notion
reduced to its ideally simplest terms. They consist
each of a single rudimentary berry, containing a
single seed, and crowned by a little point or stigma,
which is the sensitive surface to be fertilised by the
pollen from the other flowers.

In the middle, here, come the flowers of this
second or pollen-bearing sort, each of which again
consists of naked stamens ; that is to say, each flower
is here reduced to one solitary part, analogous to the
little pollen-sacs that you see hanging out in the
centre of a tiger lily or most other conspicuous gar-
den blossoms. Every such stamen is made up of two
tiny bags, which open when ripe and discharge their
golden pollen. Though the pollen looks to the naked
eye like mere yellow dust, yet, when put under a
microscope, it is seen to consist of small egg-like
bodies, having a characteristic shape and appearance
in each different flower, exactly as the seeds and fruits
have to the naked eye. With these two essential

242 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

elements of floral architecture we are now pretty fami-
liar from our previous examination of other plants.

On top of all, however, come a group of very
peculiar blossoms, found only in the arum and no-
where else, and consisting of several little green
knobs, like those of the pistil-bearing flowers, but
each crowned by a long hair or filament, bent down-
wards towards the base of the hood or sheath, and
very much larger than the sensitive surface of the
lower blossoms. The origin and meaning of these
peculiar organs we will come to consider later on: for
the present it will be sufficient to observe their shape
and position, and to notice that their hairs point
downward and inward like the spikes of a lobster pot,
at a point exactly corresponding to the narrowest
neck or throat of the inclosing sheath. ©

And now, how did the cuckoo-pint come to possess
this very singular arrangement of tiny separate flowers
in a close spike; female below, male in the centre, and
neuter or rudimentary on the top of all? To answer
this question properly, we must go back to the earlier
ancestors of the arum tribe—and I may as well start
fair by saying at once that the arums are by descent
degenerate lilies, like wheat, and that each.of these
very degraded little flowers really represents a primi-
tive full-blown and bright-coloured lily blossom. You

Cuckoo-Pint. 243

will remember that a true lily is made up-of six bril-
liant petals or flower-leaves, inclosing six long pendul-
ous stamens, and with a seed-vessel or ovary of three
cells in the very centre. Such a blossom as that we
call a perfect flower, because it possesses within itself
all the component elements of any blossom—calyx,
petals, stamens, and pistil. Moreover, it is, so to
speak, a self-contained and self-sufficing flower ; it
has bright petals to entice an insect fertiliser, pollen
to impregnate its ovary, and embryo seeds to form the
future ripe fruit. But as we have so often noticed, it
is highly undesirable for a flower to be fertilised with
pollen from its own stamens: those plants which are
impregnated from the ‘stamens of their neighbours
always produce more seed and stronger seedlings than
those which are impregnated with home-made pollen
from their own sacs. Hence, cross-fertilisation, we
know, is the great end aimed at by all flowers; and
those plants which happen to vary in any direction
favourable to cross fertilisation invariably succeed best
in the struggle for life, while those which happen to
vary in any direction hostile to it, or which acquire
the bad habit of self-fertilisation, tend slowly to go to
the wall, and to die out from inherited and ever-
increasing feebleness of constitution.

There can. be very little doubt that the ancestors

244 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

of the arums had originally six coloured petals like
the lilies, for a reason which IJ will shortly mention ;
and inside these petals were six stamens and a three-
celled ovary or unripe capsule. It is a very long step,
certainly, from such perfect flowers as those to such
very rudimentary and reduced types as the little florets
which we get in the cuckoo-pint, each consisting of a
few stamens or a single one-seeded fruitlet, without
any trace of petals whatsoever. Yet we have very
good evidence of the slow course of degradation by
which the arums have reached their present condition ;
and, as happened in the case of wheat, several surviv-
ing intermediate forms enable us to bridge over the in-
tervening gulf. In other words, there are plants which
resemble the lilies in some things, while they resemble
the arums in others ; and by means of these plants we
can trace a regular gradation from the perfect and
_ bright-coloured flowers of the true lily to the imperfect
and inconspicuous little unisexual blossoms of our
English cuckoo-pint. It is interesting, too, to observe
how the very same original stock which in one direc-
tion gave birth to the degenerate wind-fertilised wheat
and grasses, has in another direction given birth to the
equally degenerate but insect-fertilised arums and their
congeners. The one case shows the course of degra-
dation as it takes place in.-poor dry soils; the other

Cuckoo-Pint. 245

case shows it as it takes place in the moist and rich
mould of watery ditches.

Look first at the curious flower which is represented
for us here in the little sketch at the side. In the slow
rivers of Suffolk, and along the shallow edges of the
Norfolk broads, there grows a pretty spiky water- plant,
known by the scientific name of Acorus, or by the
simpler English ‘titles of sweet-flag and sweet-sedge.
This acorus is a highly aromatic reed-like plant, with
long lance-shaped leaves, and a dense spike of small
yellowish-green blossoms, standing out in a cylindrical
form from the thick rod which does
duty for its stem. At first sight
you would-not say that these flowers

2

differed very much from those of He ccnae ance
the arum: they look pretty much _of Sweet-sedge.

the same sort of small unnoticeable green knobs to a
casual observer. But when one comes to pick out one
of them from the close mass, and to examine it with
a common pocket lens, one can see at once that,
though very much reduced in size and colour, it
is still at bottom essentially a lily flower. In the
diagram we have one of these small ‘blossoms con-
siderably enlarged, and it is easy to see that it
possesses all the various parts which characterise
the true lilies. There are six petals, clearly enough,

246 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

though they are minute and green instead of being.
brilliantly coloured; and they are closely folded
over the central organs, instead of being bent back
and displayed ostentatiously to the eyes of passing
-insects. There are six stamens too, one under each.
petal, almost concealed by the scale-like covering ;
and in the centre there is an ovary which when cut
across proves to have sometimes two and sometimes
three seed-bearing cells, for the number here has be-
come a little indefinite: nature, as so often happens,
has begun to lose count. There can be no sort of
doubt, then, that acorus represents a very reduced
and degraded lily, still retaining all its primitive
structural arrangements, but with its flowers greatly
diminished in size, and with its original bright colour
almost entirely lost by disuse and degradation.

The reason why this little acorus or sweet-sedge
has thus gone backward in the course of development
is not a very® difficult one to understand. : Brilliant
flowers like the lilies depend for fertilisation upon
large colour-loving insects, such as bees and butter-
flies, which are attracted by their flaunting hues and
their abundant store of rich honey, and so uncon-
sciously carry the impregnating. pollen from head to
head. But many other plants find it suits their pur-
pose better to depend either upon the wind or upon

Cuckoo-Pint. 247

small insect friends of less pronounced zsthetic
tastes ; and this is especially the case, among other
classes, with almost all:waterside plants. Hence such
plants have usually acquired small and inconspicuous
separate flowers ; and then, to make up for their loss
in attractiveness, like cheap sweetmeats, they have
very largely increased their numbers, Or, to put’the
matter more simply and physically, in waterside
situations ‘those. plants succeed best which have a
relatively large number of individually small and
unnoticeable flowers, massed together into large and
closely serried bundles. Hence, in such situations,
there is.a tendency for petals to be suppressed, and
for blossoms to grow minute; because the large and
bright flowers seldom succeed in attracting big land-
insects like bees or butterflies, while the small and
thick-set ones usually do succeed in attracting a great
many little flitting waterside midges. Examples may
be found in the rushes, bur-reeds, catstails, and many
other freshwater plants. .
For such a. rvé/e our friend the sweet-sedge is
peculiarly well adapted. Its small yellowish blossoms,
though separately unnoteworthy, are rendered. con-
spicuous in the mass by their dense grouping : and its
extremely aromatic perfume makes it a great favourite
with the tiny flies and water-haunting insects, who

448 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

are much more guided’ in their search for food by.
scent than by sight. These little flies carry its pollen
from one head to another, and. so unconsciously
fertilise, the future seeds, and give the plant a firm
foothold in all situations which are naturally suitable
for its peculiar mode of growth.

The common marsh calla of northern Europe
(fig. 53) bridges over the gap between this English
plant and the stages below it
on the path of degradation.
Calla has by disuse quite lost
its petals, but it nevertheless re-

Fic, 53.—Single flower of tains six stamens to each flower,

gael, ‘grouped round a single ovary.
Hee the close relationship to the true lilies still remains
quite apparent. . \

" Next in descending order, on the way to the
cuckoo-pint, we may take that common white lily
which growseo often in cottage windows, and which
boasts more names, Latin and English, than almost
any other plant whose personal acquaintance I have
ever had the pleasure of making. The members
of a Sheffield long firm themselves have seldom so
many aliases as this honest and unoffending flower.
Botanists call it Richardia Africana ; gardeners dub.
it Calla AEthiopica ; and the general public knows it

Cuckoo-Pint. | 249

indiscriminately as Ethiopian lily, white calla, snowy
arum, St. Helena arrowroot, and lily of the Nile.
However, in spite of its numerous disguises, I dare
say it will be easy to recognise the plant I mean,
when I say that it is very much like a cuckoo-pint,
only with a pure snow-white hood, and a bright
golden yellow spike projecting from the top. As in
the cuckoo-pint this golden spike is the part which
contains the true flowers; and the snow-white hood
is only a sort of shroud or cloak which covers them
in from the vulgar gaze. The Ethiopian lily, then
(since we must choose one among its many names),
presents us with a further step on the downward
path of degradation from the true lilies towards the
thoroughgoing cuckoo-pint: for, as preachers justly
remark, there is no drawing a line after you have
once begun upon the wrong track, and a lily which
lets in the thin end of the wedge by becoming a
sweet-sedge is almost certain to énd at last, in the
‘form of its remote descendants, as a mere’ degenerate
and neglected arum. | ,

When we cut open the hood of the thiopian lily,
we find inside it a°spike somewhat resembling that
of the cuckoo-pint, but differing in one or two im-
portant ‘particulars.. Near ‘the bottom, at a point
‘corresponding to that where: the female flowers grow

250 Flowers: and their - Pedigrees

in the wild English arum, the white Ethiopian lily
has a number of small greenish knobs, apparently
embedded in a golden yellow matrix ; at the top, the
whole of the spike consists of a similar golden-yellow
substance, which, at a certain period in the flowering
process, effloresces, so to speak, with a copious greasy
white dust, something like starch or wheaten flour.
But if we split down the spike itself through the
centre, we can soon find out what is the meaning
of this curious arrangement. The golden substance
which makes up the mass of the spike consists really
of innumerable yellow stamens, packed so tightly to-
gether over the whole stem, and so closely sessile (as
we call it technically) upon the central axis, that
they look like a single piece of homogeneous waxy
material. You can separate them from one another,
however, with your fingers, and then you see that
each one is roughly pentagonal or hexagonal in
outline, owfhg to the pressure of its surrounding
neighbours, and that it consists essentially of a small
pollen bag, containing a quantity of yellowish liquid.
When the stamens are quite ripe, this liquid assumes —
the form of small white pollen grains, which are
pushed out as the bags open, and become the efflor-
escence or powder that covers the spike in its ripe
state. At the bottom of the spike, where we get the

Cuckoo-Pint. ; % - 25T

pistil-bearing flowers in the cuckoo-pint, the AEthio-
pian lily has several small blossoms intermediate
between the perfect flowers of the acorus, or the half-
perfect flowers of the marsh calla, and the very im-
perfect flowers of the arum; for each of them has
here a central green knob or capsule, surrounded
irregularly by four or five stamens, but without any
petals, or even any scales to represent them.. These -
form the green bodies which I have already described
as apparently embedded in a hard yellow matrix ; and
that yellow matrix is composed of the stamens. The
lower part of the Ethiopian lily, in fact, consists of
irregular flowers which, like those of the marsh calla,
have quite lost their petals, but which still retain an
indefinite number of stamens grouped around a single
pistil ; while in the upper part, as in the central group
of the arum, the pistils have disappeared also,. and
only the stamens remain. Such a plant as this lily,
then, is clearly on the way to becoming what the
arum has actually become: its flowers already show
a tendency toward the unisexual condition. In the
upper portion they have all become actually unisexual,
for there we get nothing but stamens; in the lower
part they remain irregularly bisexual, for there, though
the stamens are often reduced in number—nature los-
’ ing count again—some of them still remain embedded

252 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

on the spike between the scattered pistils. This
result is just what you might naturally.expect from
squeezing a lot of marsh calla blossoms closely
together on a spike. Even in the upper half of the
spike, the blossoms often keep up some marks of.-their
original bisexual character, for you will occasionally
find a few stray green knobs sparsely sprinkled: here
and there among the golden stamens of the top portion.
Nevertheless, we may fairly say that even here a ten-
dency towards specialisation has been distinctly set
up: the uppermost flowers tend to become almost
entirely pollen bearing sacs, and the lowermost
flowers tend to become preponderatingly, though
not entirely, seed-bearing ovaries. ,

Now if we turn from these transitional steps to the
completely developed arum, what do we find? ; Here,
the top of the spike has become absolutely bald .and
bare of. flowers, instead of being covered, as in. the
thiopian fily, with thickly grouped florets up to
its very summit; and at the same time, the actual
flowers in the lower portion, instead of running to-
gether into an uninterrupted cone, are separated. into
three distinct groups or bodies. At the bottom of all,
as in the Ethiopian lily, we now get the female
flowers alone ; only, instead of being intermixed with
stamens, they consist simply of ‘naked ovaries; the

a uckoo-Pint. 253

differentiation or seacialigation of the flowers is here
complete. Above them, as before, we get the male
- flowers, reduced to a single stamen, or rather to a
group of from four to six stamens each, all run to-
gether: for though it is usual to consider each stamen
as a separate flower (which it certainly is in some still
more degraded arums, like the little ‘Capuchin’ of
southern Europe), I think the analogy of marsh calla
and the Ethiopian lily justifies us in regarding them
as groups of six, more or less defective, and jammed
closely together, with the ovaries crushed out between
them. And at the top of all we get a perfectly
new factor in the compound community—a number
of green sacs capped by downward-pointing hairs,
which are, in fact, abortive pistils, like those organs
that form the lower group, only with their ovaries
barren, and their styles or sensitive surfaces length-
‘ened out into spiky hairs.' What may be the use
or function of these curious objects we will. proceed
to inquire a little later: for the present we must
turn our attention to the origin of another part
of the cuckoo-pint’s apparent blossom, the large
and conspicuous greenish-purple hood, which alone

1 It is usual to treat these organs as staminodes— that is to say,
abortive stamens. I know no reason for this classification, and the

analogy of the scattered ovaries in the upper part of the Aithiopian lily
leads me rather to regard them.as altered pistils,

“254 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

composes the flower in the popular sense of the
‘word.

There is nothing at all like that, a casual observer
would probably be tempted at first to say, in any
ordinary true lily that any one ever yet came across,
A bunch of lilies growing on a stalk, with a sort of
huge winding-sheet wrapped round them, is a thing
that surely nobody has ever seen. So it would seem
at a first glance; and yet there is one lily-like plant
that we all know well, in which the flowers are at one
time wrapped up in exactly such an enveloping sheet.
Have you ever watched a narcissus or a daffodil un-
‘folding its pretty yellow buds? If you have, you will
remember that at first they are all tightly covered over
by a thin papery membrane, shaped exactly like the
hood of this cuckoo-pint ; and that after the scented
‘blossoms have all come out, this membrane, or spathe,
‘as we call it in the horrid technical 1anguage of botany,
turns back upon the stem, like a sort of cup below the
flowers. To be sure, the daffodil and ‘the narcissus
are not, in the strictest sense of the word, true lilies at
all, but amaryllids, because they have got an inferior
instead of a superior ovary ; but, even in the technically
restricted lily.family itself, there are lilies with just
‘such a spathe or enveloping membrane, as’ in the
familiar head of onions and garlic, as well as in some

Cuckoo-Pint. 2 55

more respectable and dignified flowers. Now, one has
only got to suppose the number of buds in each head
largely increased, the whole head lengthened out into a
spike, and the spathe or sheath grown larger in‘o a
completely inclosing hood, and there we have at once
anarum or an Athiopian lily. Only, as often happens
under such circumstances, the individual flowers have
now grown too small to attract the fertilising insects
separately on their own account ; so the spathe or hood
has to do duty for them all at once collectively. It
incloses and conceals the various minute flowers, but it
becomes itself coloured and attractive, so as to allure
the eyes of the little insects on behalf of the entire com-
munity. In other words, when the central flowers had
become so much diminished in size by disuse, by loss of
their petals, and by specialisation of sexes, they ran no
chance of getting fertilised at all unless they possessed
some exceptional means ‘of attracting insects. Hence
those alone have survived which happened to develop
some such attractive organ as the hood of the Athiopian
lily or the purple central spike of the English arum. |
And now we come at last to the final purpose of
all these curious structural arrangements. The object
of them all is of course to ensure the cross-fertilisation
of the different heads of flowers; but the special way
in which they effect this universal end is singularly

256 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

ingenious, interesting, and almost intentional in its
design. The A®thiopian lily, one can readily under-
stand, attracts many insects by its large brilliant white
hood, as well as by the rich gulden-yellow colour of
the stamens which cover the summit of its spike. But
in the arum the top of the spike is bare, and has
become expanded into a club-shaped organ, which is
deeply tinged with purple, and stands out vividly
against the bright green of the spathe at its back, soas
to form an excellent advertisement for the giddy eyes
of little passing winged insects. It is upon these
insects that the arum depends entirely for fertilisation,
and the way in which it manages to obtain their
services is as curious as anything in the whole range
of vegetable existence.
If, when the arum-flowers are just beginning to
blossom, I were to cut down one of the hoods half-
' way through the centre, sideways, I should find a
great many®*tiny winged flies all crawling about at
the very bottom of the deep tube. They have come
from some other neighbouring arum-flower, where
they have been well dusted with the golden pollen ;
and they crawl down the neck of the hood, past the
lobster-pot hairs which close its narrowest portion,
into the broader open space beneath. Here they
find the pistil-bearing blossoms just ripe for impreg-

Cuckoo-Pint. 257

nation ; and, crawling over them in an aimless sort of
fashion, they rub off upon their sensitive surfaces
some of the pollen which they brought with them
from the last plant they visited. This pollen thus
cross-fertilises the fruit, and produces in it seeds
which are the product of two distinct parents, and
therefore capable of springing up into vigorous seed-
lings of the strongest sort.

But though the small flies have fies benefited the
plant by fertilising its ovaries with pollen brought
from another head, they have as yet got no return for
their trouble in the shape of meat or drink: and,
unless they did so, they certainly would not take the
trouble to visit any other flower of the same sort.
The stamens are not yet ripe, and do not ripen until
after the pistils have set their fruit. If they did
otherwise, then the pollen would fall from them down
upon the sensitive surfaces of their sister blossoms
below, and the plant would accordingly be self-
fertilised—-a thing to be always avoided as far as pos-
sible. Accordingly, it is a fixed rule in the cuckoo-
pints that the pistils, which are below, come to
maturity first, while the stamens, which are above,
shed their stock of pollen a day or two later. This
being so, the flies find nothing in the new flower to

detain them any longer; and, if they could, they ~
12

258 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

would crawl up the spike and get out again by the
same way as they got in, never troubling themselves
any more about such useless flowers. Here, however,
the curious lobster-pot hairs for the first time come
into play. They act, in short, exactly like a common
eel-trap. The flies walked in easily enough, the way
the hairs naturally pointed; but when they try to
walk out again, they find their way completely
blocked by the chevaux-de-frise of stiff bristles.
There is nothing that beats a crawling insect like a
.thicket of hairs ; he finds it as impossible to creep up
against their grain as we ourselves find it to force our
way through a tropical jungle of cactus and prickly
spurges. So there they wait perforce for a time in
durance vile, wandering up and down helplessly
among the lower flowers, and. effectually brushing
off against them every single grain of pollen which
they. brought on their legs or breasts from the last
flower they*visited.

At last, in a day or so, the young berries begin to
swell slowly, and all the pistil-bearing flowers show
by this quickening action that they have been duly
and properly fertilised. Then comes the turn of the
stamens. One after another they open their little
double pollen-sacs, and shed their golden powder
down upon the wings and bodies of the small flies

Cuckoo-Pint. 259

imprisoned beneath. Even if a little of it happens to
catch upon the pistils here and there, that does not
matter now, for all the ovaries are already duly impreg-
nated, and the sensitive surfaces have shrivelled utterly
away; so most of the pollen falls on to the floor of
the hood, where the small flies are waiting impatiently
and hungrily for the Danae flood. It covers them
all over from head to foot with the golden grains,
and clogs their legs and wings and bodies in every
portion. A fine time the flies have of it then. They
get actually drunk with pollen after their fast ; and,
if you cut open one of the hoods in this stage of
development, you wiil find the little creatures posi-
tively reeling about in their intoxication, and so full-
fed with rich grains that they can hardly use their
legs or wings to crawl or fly. A little fresh air seems
to revive them slightly, as is often the case with other
gentlemen under similar circumstances; and then
they can feebly fly away after a few minutes.

But in the natural state of things, when no wan-
dering botanist comes with his penknife to make what’
he calls in his lively language a ‘longitudinal section
of Arum maculatum,’ the flies remain at the bottom
of their deep well till they have eaten almost all the
pollen, and got most helplessly and stupidly drunk in
the process. A great waste of pollen this, for the

260 Fiowers and ther Pedigrees.

plant, of course ; but still it costs no more than honey
would do, and quite enough remains on the legs and
wings of the flies to impregnate their fellow-blossoms
on another plant. At last all the pollen is shed
and eaten, and then the flies again become anxious
to shift their quarters to some more favourable spot,
where there is more food to be found, and another
drunken orgy to be expected. This time, however,
the hairs no longer impede their progress ; they have
all shrivelled up meanwhile, and the ecl-trap is there-
fore now dissolved ; so the flies hurry away once more,
covered with the stock of pollen-dust which has been
showered down upon them: by their late host.

One might suppose, at first, that after one such
experience the flies would studiously avoid cuckoo-
pints in future. Nothing of the sort. Experience
seems to be thrown away upon insects ; and besides,
the little creatures seem actually to enjoy their intoxi-
cated revels’ Pollen apparently acts upon them as an
incentive, exactly as opium acts upon a Chinaman.

' The first thing they do the moment they are released
is to forthwith fly off to the nearest other cuckoo-pint.
They see a purple, club-shaped spike, somewhere close
by, overtopping the folded lips of the green hood, and
they make straight for that well-known signpost, as
the lordly human race makes for the flaring lights of

Cuckoo-Pint. 261

a gilded public-house. Once more they crawl down
the funnel-shaped tube ; once more they pass the eel-
pot hairs ; and once more they rub off the pollen that
clings to their legs and sides upon the sensitive surfaces
of the lower flowers. For a while they have again to
fast in their narrow piison; and then the stamens
of the second arum open their pollen-sacs, and’ dust
the greedy insects a second or third time with golden
grains, So, throughout the whole flowering season of
‘the arums, these little flies go about from head to
head in constant relays, unconsciously benefiting the
plant, while they are effecting theirown hungry purpose
in eating up the spare pollen. From the point of view
of the insects, the only use of arums is to produce
food and shelter for wandering flies; but from the
point of view of the plant, the only use of insects is
to act as common carriers for the conveyance of pollen
from one head to another. Man, however, is far wiser
and more expansive in his ideas about the economy
of nature than either: according to him, the real,
final end of all this beautiful and marvellous me-
chanism is to produce Portland arrowroot for starch-
ing his own civilised shirt-fronts, wristbands, and
collars.
After the dissolute small flies have performed their
function in the economy of the cuckoo-pint by thus

262 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

fertilising the small green ovaries, the plant begins to
enter upon a fresh phase of existence. It has now
no further use for its hood and its purple-topped spike,
which have answered their purpose in attracting the
insects ; and therefore it gets rid of them in the same
summary way in which mankind generally get rid of
a faithful old horse, or a superannuated servant. The
hood withers slowly away; the top of the spike, as
far down as the base of the cluster of stamens, grad-
ually decays ; and at last you find nothing left but a
bunch of rather shapeless green berries, elevated on a
stiff, fleshy stalk, and with a scar at their bottom in the
place where the hood used once to join on.
As summer wears away the berries grow
bigger and bigger, while at the same time

they become redder and redder. At last,
with the first approach of autumn, they ap-

Fic. 54.

pear as the bright cluster of coral-coloured
berries, represented at the side, with which we are all
so familiar in our September hedgerows.

What is the use of this new manceuvre? Well, it
is not simply that common to most succulent fruits.
Each of these bright red berries incloses a single hard
nut-like seed. Its object is to attract the fruit-eating
birds, the field-mice, and the other small animals, to
eat it up whole. For this end, just as so many flowers

Cuckoo- Pint. 263

have bright-coloured ‘petals to attract the eyes of
insects, we know that fruits have bright-coloured
pulpy coverings to attract the eyes of birds or mam-
mals. And as the flowers put honey in their nectaries
as an allurement for the bees, so the fruits put
sugary juices in their pulp as an allurement for the
robins and bullfinches. So far, the trick is just the
ordinary plan of all fruit-bearers, The arum, however,
has a still more cruel and insidious mode of procedure.
Its berries are poisonous ; and very often,I believe, they .
destroy the little birds that they have enticed by their
delusive prettiness. Then the body of the murdered
robin decays away, and forms a mouldering manure-
heap, from which the young cuckoo-pint derives a
‘store of fresh nutriment. I will not positively assert
that it is for this reason the cuckoo-pint has acquired
its poisonous juices ; but I cannot help seeing that if
any berry happened to show any tendency in such a
direction, and so occasionally poisoned the creatures
which eat it, it would thereby obtain an advantage in
the struggle for existence, and would tend to increase
the poisonous habit so far as it continued to obtain
any further advantage by so doing. ‘To some people
this may seem grotesque ; but the grotesqueness is in
the facts of nature, not in the appreciation of their
inevitable results. Poisonous berries are unquestion-

264 Flowers and their Pedigrees.

ably useful to the plants which bear them ; and, if we
find their usefulness ridiculous, that is a peculiarity of
our own sense of. humour which in no way affects the
abstract truth of the observation, It is impossible,
in fact, that a plant should not benefit by having its
berries poisonous, and so some plants must necessarily,
in the infinite variability of nature, acquire the property
of killing their friendly allies, It has been asked
why the birds have not on their side learnt that the
arum is poisonous. The very question shows at once
an ingrained inability to understand the working of
natural selection. Every bird that eats arum berries
gets poisoned: but the other birds don’t hold a
coroner’s inquest upon its body or inquire into the
cause of death. Naturally the same bird never eats
the berries twice, and so experience has nothing more
to do with the matter than in the famous illogicality
about the skinning of eels.

There are many other curious points of interest
about the arum: there are the glossy arrow-headed
leaves; there is the sharp, deterrent, pungent juice ;
the tall, succulent, biting stem; the thick, starchy,
poisonous rootstock, where the plant lays by the store
of nutriment it collects each summer for next spring’s
flowering season. All these demand and repay the
minutest and most careful study. But life is too

4

Cuckoo-Pint. | 265

short for us to know even a cuckoo-pint to the very
bottom ; and so, perhaps, instead of turning aside to
other subjects of interest in its structure and functions,
it will be best to recapitulate afresh from an historical
point of view the main steps in the evolution of the
arum tribe at which we have already glanced.
3 Originally, the ancestors of the arum were a sort
of lilies, with bright petals, and with six stamens and
a three-celled ovary to each flower. They had also a
papery spathe or hood, like the narcissus and the
onion, at the base of their blossoms; and this spathe
has been gradually modified into the green cap of
the modern cuckoo-pint. Slowly the flowers became
reduced in size, like those of acorus; and then they
grew degraded in structure, till at last they entirely
lost all their petals—a stage at which the lower flowers -
of the #thiopian lily still remain. Next, the blossoms
began to differentiate into three distinct groups, which
owed their specialised form to the new mode of insect
fertilisation. The lowest flowers lost all their stamens,
and were reduced to a single ovary each, The middle
flowers lost all their ovaries, and were reduced toa
few stamens each. The topmost flowers underwent
a still more curious change, and after losing their
stamens made their ovaries abortive, in order to act
as eel-traps for the fertilising flies. The series of

266 Flowers and ther Pedigrees.

alterations by which these structural modifications
were brought about must have been very slow; and
they must have been produced by the constant fertili-
sation’ of such arums as best retained the visiting
flies, and the dying out of such as did not well retain
them. Last of all, the berries grew large and red
under the influence of animal selection, those berries
which attracted birds succeeding in producing new
plants, while those which did not so attract them died
out unsuccessfully. And at the same time the ovary
came to contain only one seed, instead of three cells
with many seeds, because one seed under the new and
improved method of dispersion went as far as five or
ten would have gone under the old and wasteful casual
method. Thus at last what had been a bunch of
distinct coloured lilies grew to be a cuckoo-pint with
an inclosing hood and a spike of minute central in-
conspicuous flowers. .

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