PO VER T V AND BANKR UPTCY. 219 



this downhill fight. They cannot hold their own — 

 they find circumstances too much for them. Accord- 

 ingly we find they are cutting down their expenditure. 

 Some have done this until there is little or nothing 

 left to economise further. Frail annuals, whose 

 entire mass, perhaps, does not weigh half an ounce, 

 find it impossible to propagate their kind without 

 resorting to various devices, and assuming habits as 

 widely different from those of their better-off kins- 

 men, as frequenting the pawnshop by honest but 

 needy gentlewomen contrasts with the afternoon 

 airing in the Park of their wealthier cousins. 



" The poor ye have always with you " might have 

 been addressed to the vegetable kingdom instead of 

 the human family ; and it is of these I like especially 

 to speak. We have seen that many species of plants, 

 not confined to any particular order, have found it 

 difficult to keep pace with life, and that they have 

 all alike adopted a simple method by which extra 

 expenditure could be prevented. In many species 

 this has proceeded so far as to evolve a peculiar 

 set of flowers, called Cleistogainic^ which may be 

 regarded as ordinary flowers arrested in growth, so 

 that they never open. In short, they never attain 

 to a higher rank than closed flower-buds, instead of 

 developing and expanding into true flowers. As if to 

 show us that this singular group of flowers has come 

 into existence through poverty, we find them in every 

 degree and stage of abortion, from a mere pin's head 



