MISUNDERSTANDINGS. 1 1 



which, by the sidelights thrown upon them by the 

 doctrine of evolution, now assist the botanist in 

 working out the ancestral history of plants in a 

 marvellous and unexpected manner. 



The real nature of a plant is hardly understood, 

 even by many who have taken up botany as a 

 holiday science. We hear so much of flowers, of 

 their elegant shapes, their delicately tinted or gorge- 

 ously coloured petals, and of their delightful per- 

 fumes, that many people imagine plants must have 

 been formed for the special purpose of bearing 

 flowers alone ! To such people it seems almost 

 libellous to say that every flower is in reality com- 

 posed of aborted and degraded leaves — that a leaf 

 is a much more highly-organised vegetable produc- 

 tion than a petal ! Yet such a statement is quite 

 correct. Leaf- buds can be changed at will into 

 flower-buds, as every gardener knows. This trans- 

 formation is effected by starving and crippling the 

 plant, not by feeding it. The horticulturist " rings," 

 or otherwise cripples his Azaleas and Camellias, so 

 as to force them to produce flower-buds instead of 

 leaf- buds. In other words, he decreases the food 

 supply, and so produces a part less highly organised 

 than leaves would be. 



In nature the same end is effected in other ways. 

 Flowers are frequently terminal — that is to say, 

 are borne at the ends of branches, where the up- 

 rising sap or fluid food must be thinnest and poorest. 



