A Family His lory. 231 



adaptation is itself of the nature of a degradation, 

 because it is a lapse from a higher to a lower grade 

 of organisation — it is like a civilised man taking to 

 a Robinson Crusoe existence, and dressing in fresh 

 skins. Indeed, so largely has the salad-burnet lost 

 the distinctive features of its relatives, the true roses, 

 that no one but a skilled botanist would ever have 

 guessed it to be a rose at all. In outer appearance it 

 is much more like the little flat grassy plantains 

 which grow as weeds bj' every roadside ; and it is 

 only a minute consideration of its structure and 

 analogies which can lead us to recognise it as really 

 and essentially a very degenerate and inconspicuous 

 rose. Yet its ancestors must once have been true 

 roses, for all that, with coloured petals and all the 

 rosaceous characteristics, since it still retains many 

 traces of its old habits even in its modern degraded 

 form. 



We have in England another common weed, verj' 

 like the salad-burnet, and popularly known as stanch- 

 wound, or great-burnet, whose history is quite as 

 interesting as that of its neighbour. The stanch- 

 wound is really a salad-burnet which has again lost 

 its habit of depending upon the wind for fertilisation, 

 and has reverted to the earlier insect-attracting tactics 

 of the race. As it had already lost its petals, how- 



