78 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE. 



during the autumn months. A cut-and-dry 

 technical botanist would therefore have little 

 to say to it in its present stage, because he 

 cares only for the flowers and seeds which 

 help him in his dreary classifications, and give 

 him so splendid an opportunity for displaying 

 the treasures of his Latinised terminology. 

 But to me the plant itself is the central point 

 of interest, not the names (mostly in bad 

 Greek) by which this or that local orchid- 

 hunter has endeavoured to earn immortality. 

 This arum, for example, grows first from 

 a small hard seed with a single lobe or seed- 

 leaf. In the seed there is a little store of 

 starch and albumen laid up by the mother- 

 plant, on which the young arum feeds, just as 

 truly as the growing chick feeds on the white 

 which surrounds its native yolk, or as you 

 and I feed on the similar starches and albu- 

 mens laid by for the use of the young plant 

 in the grain of wheat, or for the young fowl 

 in the egg. Full-grown plants live by taking 

 in food-stuffs from the air under the influence 



