Cleavers. 



lO" 



pass through a first simple shape which helps us to 

 picture to ourselves what they once were — what, for 

 example, the ancestors of the goose-grass looked like, 

 long before they were goose-grasses at all. Now here 

 in my hand I have got a young speci- 

 men in its very earliest stage, which 

 closely reproduces the primitive type 

 of its first progenitors, a million ages 

 since. Goose-grass is an annual weed : 

 it dies down utterly every autumn, 

 and only reproduces itself by seed 

 in the succeeding spring ; but this 

 year the weather has been so excep- 

 tionally warm and summerlike that 



thousands of young plants have Seedling of Cleavers. 



sprouted from the seed ever since Christmas ; and 

 among them is the specimen which I have just 

 picked, and which you may have for examination if 

 )-ou will take the trouble. Look into it, and you 

 will sec that its two first leaves are quite unlike 

 the upper ones — a phenomenon which frequently 

 occurs in seedling plants, and with which you are 

 probably familiar in the case of the pea and of the 

 garden bean. But this difference is always a differ- 

 ence in one direction only ; the first leaves which 

 come out of the seed are invariably simpler in shape 



Fig. 23. 



