ANALOGIES AND AFFINITIES. 295 
cate close genetic relation, they are also not rarely, perhaps 
very frequently, mere analogies, purely imitative resem- 
blances. 
This is touching upon one of the hard problems of botani- 
cal science. The great desideratum is a rule by which the 
so-called “characters” of families, genera and species may 
be distinguished, the true from the false, and the real marks 
of relationship be sifted out from among the mass of analo- 
gies,—mere simulations, with which they are, as they have 
always been, confounded by the most consummate masters of 
systematic botany,—confounded because there is apparently 
no way of determining when or where a given characteristic 
is of analogy, or when or where it of affinity. My own pur- 
pose: in initiating a series of papers upon Analogies and 
Affinities is simply to give forth facts and impressions! of my 
own, and of other people, in hope that the more capable may 
take up the subject and pursue it to better purpose. 
To begin with: I have been for some years awake to a 
sense of the very close consanguinity which appears to sub- 
sist between the Lobeliacex and those plants which figure in 
most of the books as a suborder or tribe of Compositx, the 
Cichoriacese. 
Without having mastered all that may have been written 
upon the properties of plants in relation to their affinities, but 
not without much personal observation continued through 
many years, I am of the mind that like properties are more 
often of affinity and more rarely of analogy than is generally 
allowed. The aerid-narcotie qualities of the milky juice are 
identical in Lobeliaees and Cichoriaces; and, if certain 
Arctotides, only artificially distinguished from Cichoriace 
by their heterogamous heads, be joined to them, they stand 
1 ^ T£ is one thing to perceive affinities, the power to do which is intui- 
d possessed in very different degrees by different persons, the 
pointed out to him ; it is another thing to seize the clues to such affini- 
ties,” ete.—Sir J. D. Hooker, Classification of Plants; in appendix to 
English edition of Le Maout & Decaisne, p. 
