299 PITTONIA. 
In fine; the evidences of close consanguinity between all 
these plants are with me so conclusive that I venture to give 
expression to what has long been a settled conviction, that 
the resemblances which the flowers and fruits of the cichori- 
aceous alliance bear to the other “Composite” is altogether 
of analogy; purely imitative; and that the Cichoriaces are 
perfectly distinct Natural Order. 
There are few among my readers who will need to be 
informed that this is no new proposition; that it is the 
doctrine of Jussieu, and of all botanists before his time. 
And we shall be tut little more than repeating a prediction 
made by Jussieu precisely a hundred years since, if we say 
that the Composite of modern systematists is likely to prove 
at last a most unnatural congeries of tribes nearly alike in 
the accidents of a similar anthology and carpology, but having 
no genetical relation each to the others. But, as regards the 
Cichoriace: more especially, I am glad to note that Bentham 
and Hooker, whose great work on families and genera is the 
latest monument to unbending principles of carpology, admit 
that this, as a suborder or tribe, is by nature well circum- 
scribed, and easily definable, as is no other tribe of what we 
eall Composite.’ 
From these suggestions regarding ordinal affinities, I pass 
abruptly, in conclusion of this paper, to like principles as 
they may bear upon the species of plants. I have long been 
of the opinion that many species exist in nature, for which no 
specific characters can easily, or even by any known eriterion, 
be found at all in the perfectly developed individual plant ; 
in other terms, that completety and thoroughly distinct 
species may, and in some cases do, so closely simulate eac 
other that, with ordinarily good specimens before him, the 
most acute botanist will fail to be able to separate them even 
as varieties. The most conclusive proofs I have of anything 
like this lie in the life histories of a few species of my own 
naming and defining. These, for obvious reasons, I here 
1“ A nobis ascitos Cichoriacee sole limitibus certioribus cireamseripte 
sunt.”—Gen. Pl. ii. 165. 
