WINTER MEETING. 279 



we don oar harness and struggle through another season — too often 

 to find at the end of it, when we think to draw our fruit deposits from 

 nature's bank, as it were, this notice in effect staring us in the face : 

 Closed for want of currants-cy, or whatever the fruit may be. If the 

 flowers were to fail as often as the fruit does, there would be a stam- 

 pede at once from the horticultural ranks. We are held to our places 

 by that insubstantial tiction, a flower. The discrepancy between flower 

 and fruit is frequently as marked as that between the show-bills of the 

 advance agent and the actual tent performance : that is to say, that 

 sometimes the blossom is remarkably fetching, while the fruit is a dis- 

 appointment: and on the other hand there are many plants whose 

 splendid achievements put their forerunning and inadequate flowers 

 to shame. Who would dream, for instance, from the insignificant 

 flowering of the wheat plant, of the enormous aggregate output of its 

 fruit, or of its stupendous importance. Still more startling is the nat- 

 ural history of the sand-burr. If it has any flower at all the same has 

 escaped my notice, but its fruit is something that no one can pass over 

 without knowing it. 



THE LOWER ORDER OF PLA.NTS. ' 



In the lower order of plants (using the adjective not as a scientist, 

 but as a layman, and meaning by lower orders merely low-down orders, 

 like pusley and jimson), I have discovered that what I may call the 

 probability of succession is more marked than in the higher orders. 

 The pear, for example, is away up in the scale of plants — quite out of 

 sight, in fact, in many orchards where the blight has been — and none 

 but the very rash would dream of gambling upon its consequent fruit 

 from its antecedent flowers. On the other hand, a low-down jimson 

 (and nothing can be lower down than the jimson) never fails. 



THEIR HOSTILITY TO THE HIGHER ORDERS. 



One great distinction between the low-down orders and the high 

 orders of plants, according to my classification, has never been em- 

 phasized by the professional botanists, but will be at once apparent to 

 all who have had practical experience in field or garden, when pointed 

 out. It is this : that whereas everything in nature (except man) posess- 

 ing the possibilities of destruction is actively hostile to the higher order 

 of plants like the pear, with the low-down orders, like the jimson. the 

 situation is exactly reversed, and man is the only thing against them. 

 The foes of the higher orders are like the sands upon the seashore for 

 number, so that the interval from "flower to fruit" is for them filled 

 with pomological honors, and when these enemies of fruition are pro- 

 perly illustrated by means of sun-pictures representing them on a scale 



