FAMILIAR FLOWERS. 295 



By investigating the blossoms of the oak, horse-chestnut, and 

 maple, we see that these trees, ages ago, bore very many seeds, 

 which must have received but a scant provision a-piece wherewith 

 to start themselves in life. Under these circumstances, an immense 

 majority of the seedlings would die young, giving the parent plant 

 the expense of putting an enormous family out into the world, and 

 all to little purpose. To-day, evolution is teaching them " a more 

 excellent way." 



" It is a fatal habit," says Grant Allen, " to picture evolution to 

 one's self as a closed chapter. We should think of it rather as a 

 chapter that goes on writing itself for ever. Our fields are full of 

 degenerate flowers- which retain some memorial of their old estate, 

 pointing backward, like the fasces of the Byzantine Emperors, to 

 the past glories of their race in earlier times." They are also full 

 of plants which bear somewhere about them half-obliterated traces 

 which tell the story of their progress from a lower to a higher form 

 of life ; for the changes brought about by atrophy may be either 

 progressive or retrogressive. 



But atrophy, wherever we find its traces, proves to us one 

 thing, that nothing retains its place in the organism unless it makes 

 itself useful, or ornamental, or both, and that Nature tolerates no 

 shirks ; the moral of which, if moral there be, is tersely, though 

 inelegantly, expressed in the slang phrase, " You must hustle if you 

 want to be in it." And this is everlastingly, pitilessly true even of 

 the smallest herb which we crush beneath our feet. 



Ants and Orchids. — According to J. H. Hart (Nature, liil, 

 627) the presence of ants seems to be essential to the well-being 

 of certain orchids. Whether the effects produced are directly due 

 to ants, or to some indirect cause, has not yet been determined. 

 The author is inclined to the opinion that the ants confer benefit 

 on the plant by providing it with the mycelium of a fungus to 

 cover its roots, this organism enabling it to take up food which 

 would otherwise be unavailable. It may be that the presence of 

 stinging-ants protects the plant ; but Mr. Hart thinks it is almost 

 certain that the fungus, which grows on the material that the ants 

 accumulate round the roots, plays an important part in the nutri- 

 tion of the plant by providing it with food material. 



— Pharmaceutical Journal. 



