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" One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.'' 



So saj's the poet ; and so, with a far wider sphere of apphcation, may 

 say the naturalist : for this magic " touch of Nature " estabhshes a 

 mutual relationship among the three material worlds — animal, vege- 

 table, and mineral — by means of the certain characters possessed by 

 their various members. We have at present, however, only the world 

 of plants to deal with, and more especially those species which the 

 author has stigmatized as being most unnaturally combined. 



In the first place, then, the whole of the plants mentioned in the 

 preceding extract, with the exception of the snowdrop, the aloe, the 

 lily, asparagus, and butcher's broom (which are endogens), agree in 

 belonging to the great class of exogens, distinguished by their woody 

 tissue being annually deposited in zones around a cellular centre (the 

 pith) ; in this respect, then, they are primarily united by a certain 

 structural character, " independent of their outward appearance." 

 But the rose and the strawberry are still more intimately connected 

 by other certain charactei-s, in which they "resemble each other more 

 than they do anything else," except, of course, the other members of 

 the natural order to which they both belong — the Rosaceae. As the 

 author says, " We all know a rose, and we are equally well acquainted 

 with a strawberry ;" and, we may add, most people know a fox-glove. 

 Now we would ask, — Does a strawberry bear as close a resemblance 

 to a fox- glove as it does to a rose, and vice versa ? Few persons, we 

 venture to assert, would reply in the affirmative. And why ? The 

 tall- growing rose and the wand-like fox-glove resemble each other in 

 stature more than either does the lowly strawberry ; what then con- 

 stitutes the closer resemblance between the strawberry and the rose ? 

 Our author has himself unconsciously furnished a clew to the answer 

 — "You will know them by iheix Jlotoers ;''"' for the flowers supply the 

 certain characters desiderated by him, as well as the more obvious 

 ones which would lead even the uninitiated to declare the strawberry 

 more like a rose than anything else, except, as we have said, the other 

 members of the rosaceous group. 



Beginning with thefortii of the flower: the corolla of the fox-glove 

 is monopetalous and bell-shaped, while those of the rose and the 

 strawberry are composed of five distinct petals, springing from the 

 upper part of the calyx. Here then we have an obvious mark of 

 resemblance between the rose and the strawberry, and as obvious a 

 mark of diff"erence from the fox-glove. But the presence of such a 

 corolla is not a certain character, since other rosaceous plants have 

 no corolla at all : we must therefore seek for other and more stable 



