THE FLOWER AND ITS PARTS 93 
the solid Bentham and Hooker. Mr. Edward Step’s book 
on the Romance of Wild Flowers is full of information, 
and should be referred to when the plant has been 
identified. Finally, when you have learned the “ points” 
of a flower, and know them as a horse-dealer knows the 
points of a horse, you will find a rich pleasure in a 
copy, whether borrowed or your own private property, of 
Kerner and Oliver's Natural History of Plants. 
In this little book I shall be obliged, by the limits of 
space, to continue the plan we have hitherto adopted, 
and to be content with indicating the outlines merely of 
classification, insisting upon what our groups have in 
common rather than upon their differences. This is not 
the place to show how to tell the different parsleys, for 
instance, from one another, but I would rather set in 
your memory the qualities shared by all the parsley clan 
throughout the world. 
First of all we must take the flowering plants as a 
whole, and consider what they have in common, and how 
it is that we place in one allied class the oak and the chick- 
weed, the grass of the wayside and the gorgeous passion- 
flower. As was said in Chapter I, complication and 
division of labour is the basis of our classification, and 
especially division of labour as applied to the production 
by the plant of the next generation. We saw how the 
fungi and algee might split up at any point, or how any 
two cells might combine to form the offspring, the whole, 
as it were, being an ordinary incident of the plant’s 
existence. Ferns and mosses went further, and had 
generally their double set of cells, and also the curious 
arrangement of double generations, but in both the 
formation of fruit was comparatively inconspicuous. 
Amongst the flowering plants we find a very different 
