108 



and the narrow leaflets, with their acute serratures, will generally suf- 

 ficiently mark this species. 



Weihe and Nees, the authors of this species, describe two varieties, 

 one with white flowers and thick leaves, the other with red flowers 

 and more flaccid leaves. The latter is indeed an extremely beautiful 

 plant, with bright shining leaves and brilliant red flowers. It is in 

 this variety that a few glands occasionally occur on the panicle. The 

 two forms are, however, evidently osculant, and our Selborne plant 

 holds this intermediate station. T. Bell Salter. 



(To be continued). 



On the Theory of'"'' Progressive Development^'' applied in explanation 

 of the Origin and Transmutation of Species. By Hewett C. 

 Watson, Esq., F.L.S. 



British botanists, with some few honourable exceptions, would 

 appear to entertain very limited ideas regarding the scope and objects 

 of the science to which their attention is directed. The majority are 

 content to acquire a moderate knowledge of plants and their names, 

 or of the physical characters of parts (shape, proportion, colour &c.) 

 in which their resemblances and differences may be detected. In it- 

 self this is doubtless an agreeable kind of study; and it is one, more- 

 over, which so lightly taxes the mind, as to be within the grasp of 

 moderate capacities ; for even children can learn Botany thus far. 

 But scarcely any exercise or stimulus is here given to those higher 

 intellectual attributes of man, which are concerned in all trains of rea- 

 soning, and which lead to the knowledge of causation and depen- 

 dance between the phenomena of creation. The study of plants, 

 simply as physical existences, and of their resemblances and differ- 

 ences, on which technical classifications are founded, is an exercise 

 of the same mental faculties which give origin to the restless and pry- 

 ing curiosity of the monkey. So far, the botanist is an intellectual 

 Simla. He advances a step further, when he uses names and terms 

 to express these existences and their similitudes or distinctions. And 

 he ascends successively still higher in the intellectual scale, as the 

 scope of his studies extends over the vital actions of plants — the in- 

 fluence of external agencies upon their growth and health — their 

 relations to the rest of creation — and the mode, or laws, by which the 

 present vegetation of the earth's surface has been substituted in place 

 of a past vegetation, which was greatly dissimilar to that now seen 

 around us. 



