AMERICAN CINQUE-FOILS. 189 



AMERICAN CmQUE-FOILS. 



By GEANT ALLEN. 



YOUR American cinque-foils are to me a deeply inteuesting set of 

 plants. Excuse, I beg of you, dear Mr. Reader, this abrupt be- 

 ginning. I love a causerie: I love to button-bole my audience, as it 

 were, and, sitting down with it mentally on a bowlder in the meadow, 

 to discuss the matter in hand with it ttte-d-ttte, as if we two were old 

 friends, which I trust, after all, may be really the truth with the pub- 

 lic of " The Popular Science Monthly " on the present occasion. For, 

 indeed, a recent visit to America has made me realize you all far better 

 than I ever did before ; it has made me feel your individuality as I 

 never hitherto felt it; and it has also renewed with me the acquaintance 

 of many dear old floral favorites whose faces I had not seen in earnest 

 for many a long and weary year. Among them, the cinque-foils or 

 potentillas are, it is true, but a feeble folk ; very different from the 

 glorious orange lilies, and trilliums, and Solomon's-seals, whose bulbs 

 and tubers I have brought home with me to beautify a little out-of- 

 the-way Surrey garden ; but still in their own humble fashion most 

 interesting plants, from the implications as to their past history and 

 transformations legibly written by the hand of Nature upon their very 

 faces. I propose, therefore (having got you now fairly button-holed), 

 to discourse somewhat concerning the American potentillas themselves, 

 as well as concerning certain of their near and dear relations not in- 

 cluded in the same genus by the artificial and unwise arrangements of 

 our existing botany. 



The first potentilla I found in America was by chance the very one 

 that ought naturally to head the tribe in any systematic work, because 

 it is the one which more than any other seems to preserve in the great- 

 est simplicity the original traits of the prime ancestor. And when we 

 consider that from this ancestor are also descended (in all likelihood) 

 the plum, the peach, the cherry, the almond, the apple, the i)ear, the 

 strawberry, the raspberry, the rose, and the hawthorn, it must immedi- 

 ately be apparent to the meanest understanding that the plant in ques- 

 tion deserves the greatest consideration at our hands as the founder of 

 a large and important family. Nevertheless, this rather scrubby weed 

 {Potentilla Norwegica) with its yellow flowers and hairy stem, much re- 

 sembles the founders of many other distinguished families in being 

 personally mean, sordid, and inconspicuous. But in spite of its mean- 

 ness, the Norway potentilla shows many signs of its high respectability 

 as the representative of the elder branch of the family in the direct 

 line. To begin with, its blossoms are a shabby yellow ; and shabby 

 yellow I take to have been the original color in every instance of the 

 earliest petals of insect-fertilized flowers. Then, again, it is an annual 



