Roses and Apples 39 
indicate the stages of advancement by which the Roses 
and Apples have come. We have been so far considering 
the aristocracy of the Rose family; let us now turn 
to the older but humbler branches of the tribe. On 
every common and waste place, by every dusty, rural 
roadside, we may find examples. 
This bright, yellow-flowered Cinquefoil (Potentilla 
reptans), which the undiscriminating public sets down 
as a kind of Buttercup, will serve our 
purpose as a sample of this group. If a 
flower of Buttercup be gathered and com- @ 
pared, point by point, with this Cinquefoil, 
they will be seen to differ very materially, 
but we may admit that people in too much 
haste to make such comparisons may easily Cinquefoil 
confuse the two. The Cinquefoil is a 
little yellow rose, and we can have little hesitation 
in following Mr. Grant Allen when he claims that the 
original founder of the great Rose family, from which 
have ascended the Roses and Apples and Brambles, 
must have been a plant closely resembling the Cinque- 
foil. That may appear a bold thing to declare, but 
there are so many species of plants still in existence 
which seem to show the way by which the more 
highly-developed members of the family may have 
attained their eminence, that it requires less courage 
to affirm than to deny it. 
This Cinquefoil has no woody stem, but merely 
a thick rootstock, from which every year new 
pink creeping stems of a slender character arise, 
and these at intervals of a few inches send down 
roots which bind it to the earth and feed the 
plant. Above these roots arise the leaves which are 
