12 Flowers and their Pedigrees 



which now crop up about even- part of its form or 

 structure. And just as surely as in surveying Eng- 

 land we can set down Stonehenge and Avebury to 

 its prehistoric inhabitants, W'athng Street and the 

 Roman Wall to its southern conquerors, Salisbury 

 and Warwick to mediaeval priests and soldiers, Liver- 

 pool and Manchester to modern coal and cotton — 

 just so surely in surveying a flower or an insect can 

 we set down each particular point to some special 

 epoch in its ancestral development. This new view 

 of nature invests every part of it with a charm and 

 hidden meaning which very few among us have ever 

 suspected before. 



Pull your daisy to pieces carefully, and you will 

 see that, instead of being a single flower, as we 

 generally suppose at a rough glance, it is in reality a 

 whole head of closely packed and veiy tiny flowers 

 seated together upon a soft fleshy disk. Of these 

 there are two kinds. The outer florets consist each 

 of a single, long, white, pink-tipped ray, looking very 

 much like a solitary petal : the inner ones consist 

 each of a small, golden, bell-shaped blossom, with 

 stamens and pistil in the centre, surrounded by a 

 yellow corolla much like that of a Canterbury bell in 

 shape, though differing greatly from it in size and 

 colour. The daisy, in fact, is one of the great family 



