HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



THE DAISY'S PEDIGREE. 



By A. II. SwiNTON. 



'""I ""WO or three years ago," says Mr. Grant 

 J- Allen, in the August number of the 

 "Cornhill," for the year iSSi, "lying in the 

 sunshine on this self-same tangled undercliff, I 

 dissected a daisy for the benefit of those readers who 

 were good enough to favour me with their kind 

 attention. But that was a purely aesthetic dissection, 

 for the sake of discovering what elements of beauty 

 the daisy had got, and why they pleasurably affected 

 our own senses or appealed with power to our higher 

 emotions. To-day, however, I propose to dissect 

 one of these daisies a little more physically and 

 unravel, if I can, the tangled skein of causes which 

 has given it its present shape and size, and colour 

 and arrangement." A very simple and logical 

 explanation of the natural order of things our 

 acquaintance now proffers in respect to this well- 

 favoured flower on the enchanted precincts of the 

 quiet undercliff, and if lineaments mean aught, then 

 he has most infallibly unfolded its shadowy pedigree. 

 "" For," he urges in conclusion, "if we follow down 

 ■the daisies' descent in the inverse order we shall see 

 that, inasmuch as they have coloured rays, they are 

 -superior to all rayless composites ; and inasmuch as 

 composites generally have clustered heads, they are 

 superior to all other flowers with separate tubular 

 corollas ; while these, again, are superior to those 

 •with separate petals ; and all petalled flowers are 

 superior to all petalless kinds." 



"But," it will be slyly asked by our academic 

 ■acquaintance, whom we are accustomed to greet of a 

 shiny morning on this self-same landslip, "you are 

 never going to convince me that a fir-tree gave birth 

 to a rose-bush, a rose-bush gave birth to a heather 

 clump, a heather clump gave birth to a waste of 

 eupatory, a waste of eupatory gave birth to a 

 sunflower, and a sunflower gave birth to a daisy." 

 Well, no, not precisely ; but to teach the infantile 

 mind we present ideal jiictures, confessedly inexact, 

 and it is often possible thus to substantiate that 

 which we cannot demonstrate ; and to connive at 

 this same let us leave-our sentimental nook for the 

 dutiful arena of golf. We have had a cold unpro- 

 ductive season devoid of 'novelty, say the insect- 

 hunters, and strolling along the craggy shore, when 

 the fires are on in July, as numb as any crab, say, 

 what if we should come upon a pallid, decrepit 

 daisy, with the florets of the disk few, and some of 

 them white and arrested in the very process of 

 turning into those of the ray, just as a sea-anemone 

 would appear were it petrified when in the act of 

 extending its feelers ; so that this blossom would 

 thus actually exhibit to our gaze the last two stages 

 of development thought out by the anatomist. Well, 

 everything, it is said, varies on the confines of its 

 possible existence in its present shape, and one is | 



here tempted to enquire what changing forces have 

 acted on since the golden morning of the daisy- 

 flower, and whose are the viewless fingers that have 

 drawn and pinched out a smart frill around its crov/n 

 of honeycomb? Nay and what cuts a flag into 

 streamers and spins out a plant into branches and 

 leaves, if it be not the force of the tossing winds and 

 rocking tides ? The Jubilee florin falls impressed 

 from the mint, but only think how any daisy crown 

 must have been scourged by the north wind, fluttered 

 by the east wind, breathed upon by the south wind, 

 and kissed by the west wind ; and how its fibres 

 variously struck must have vibrated to all the 

 harmony of heaven and composed atomic music until 

 the sun's image was fairly expressed ; but let this 

 pass for a more certain fact, since a glance will 

 show the unfinished flower as we plucked it upon 

 the cliff in question, in the very act of unbinding its 

 golden tresses. 



Allowing, next, the daisy head to be an eSample of 

 fasciation, coming true from seed ; the latter circum- 

 stance being alone curious, since fasciation is far too 

 frequent and identical in the vegetable kingdom to 

 be termed a monstrosity, for only think of the 

 cauliflowers and cockscombs, and all the wilding 

 growths of this description never destined to become 

 species, already chronicled in SciEXCE-GossiP ; we 

 hear it likewise asserted that all flowers with separate 

 tubular corollas are superior to those with separate 

 petals. Well, as I recall, on the 17th of September, 

 1883, as I chanced to be walking along a dark Surrey 

 lane in the neighbourhood of the Green Man tavern, 

 at Worplesdon, I noticed in the bramble-overrun 

 hedgerow the curiously fingered blossom of the 

 Large White Convolvulus (C scpiuiii, Linn.) now 

 represented by a specimen, which shows how such a 

 bell-shaped flower may revert to a petalate one by 

 dividing down between the veins. Whether the 

 ancestral blooms wore this eccentric passion-flower 

 likeness on this creeper I cannot think, albeit the 

 convolvulus structure assigns to it these five petals ; 

 or how these same petals became a white poke, as 

 children call it, I will not say, though this be by 

 some reckoned to have been a freak of nature for 

 which the insects are responsible ; and without a 

 doubt insects always enjoy to dive to the bottom of 

 it. Thus much will, however, serve to indicate that 

 not alone have we " 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 us in the 

 isolated continent of Australia ; " but that we also 

 possess in our own lanes and fields, flowers crystallized 

 in the very act of their metamorphosis ; so that not 

 tacitly has evolution "almost always left its foot- 

 marks behind it, visibly imprinted upon the earth 

 through all its ages ; " but the continuous operation 

 of this law likewise leaves behind it its tags and ends 

 as it weaves the woof and warp of fate. Now it is 



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