FAMILIAR FLOWERS. 293 



An honest, hard-working plant, which grubs for its own living, 

 has in stem and leaves an abundant supply of chlorophyll. To its 

 presence the rich greens of vegetation are due, and by its means 

 animal substances, water, and gases are converted into vegetable 

 fibre. But the plant which takes its food, already partially 

 digested, from some other plant, needs less chlorophyll for its 

 support, and Nature, with wise thrift, bestows less chlorophyll 

 upon it. Then its leaves begin to dwindle and its green colour to 

 fade, and it is driven to more and more complete parasitism by 

 growing unfitness for self-support. 



At one end of this chapter of vegetable crime and retribution 

 is the little Eye-bright of the New England hills, still bearing green 

 leaves, and, to all outward appearance, living as honestly as its 

 neighbours. At the other end is the Indian Pipe or Ghost Flower, 

 an out-and-out root-parasite, with all its stems faded to a corpse- 

 like pallor, and with its foliage dwindled away to small, scattered 

 whitish scales. 



The atrophy of the fifth stamen among the Figworts, accom- 

 panied as it is with more and more perfect adaptation of the flower 

 to the winged insect, may be regarded as the atrophy of advance- 

 ment. The dwindling and bleaching of the foliage of parasites is 

 the atrophy of degeneration. The atrophy of advancement is 

 found again if we study the growth of the fruit in some familiar 

 trees. When a plant, in shiftless and step-motherly fashion, hands 

 its off-spring over to those untender nurses, luck and chance, it 

 follows that an enormous proportion of the offspring will die. But 

 as soon as care is taken of the seed's future, making its survival 

 probable, fewer seeds are produced. " Diminution in the number 

 of seeds," says Grant Allen, " invariably accompanies every 

 advance in specialisation, or every fresh forward step in appliances 

 for more certain distribution." And "when the seeds of our 

 fruits become atrophied," says Darwin, " the fruit itself gains , 

 largely in size and quality." 



Some of our most familiar trees are even now diminishing the 

 number of their seeds. Nature, keeping up an age-old habit, 

 forms a large number of germs, but the trees, having adopted a 

 newer habit, neglect most of these germs, and bring only a rem- 

 nant of them to maturity. But these comparatively few off-spring 



