124 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
shght. Many persons who are loth to believe that 
one species of plant may have been evolved from an 
earler form by natural process, are quite willing to 
accept the foregoing legend as a reasonable explana- 
tion of the Geranium’s origin. 
We should like to take as our floral text the Wood 
Crane’s-bill (Geranium sylvaticum), for no other 
reason than that it was this plant which more than a 
hundred years ago led Konrad Sprengel to undertake 
his researches into the relations subsisting between 
flowers and insects—researches that were neglected 
by both botanists and entomologists until Charles 
Darwin called attention to them, and supplemented 
them by his own observations. But the Wood 
Crane’s-bill is confined to the northern half of our 
country, and therefore not readily accessible to the 
majority of my readers. 
A more widely distributed plant, with larger flowers, 
- is the Meadow Crane’s-bill (G. pratense), which grows 
chiefly in damp meadows, but occasionally in woods 
also. It is a perennial plant, with upright branching 
stems, three or four feet high, swollen at the joints. 
Its leaves are five or six inches across, lobed and cut 
much like those of the Buttercup, on long stalks, and 
with slender stipules. Its striking flowers are an 
inch and a half in diameter, blue-purple in colour. 
These are really handsome flowers, and not less in- 
teresting. Each flower-stalk, or peduncle as the 
botanists term it, supports two flowers on shorter, 
more slender stalks, which are known as pedicels, to 
distinguish them from the others, but we may more 
familiarly speak of them as foot - stalks. These 
flower-stalks are covered with hairs pointing down- 
