132 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



or our beautiful dappled meadows and cornfields, 

 all aglow with the Infinite wealth of poppies, blue- 

 bottles, foxgloves, ox-eye daisies, and purple fritil- 

 laries. The Alps alone can equal the brilliant color- 

 ing of our own native British flora. Poor as it is 

 in number of species — a mere isolated fragment of 

 the wider European groups— it can fearlessly chal- 

 lenge the rest of the whole world in general mingled 

 effect of gayety and luxuriance. 



Now, every one of these English plants and 

 weeds has a long and eventful story of its own. In 

 the days before the illuminating doctrine of evolu- 

 tion had been preached, all that we could say about 

 them was that they possessed such and such a 

 shape, and size, and color; and, if we had been asked 

 why they were not rounder or bigger or bluer than 

 they actually are, we could have given no suflacient 

 reason, except that they were made so. But since 

 the great principle of descent with modification has 

 reduced the science of life from chaos to rational 

 order, we are able to do much more than that. We 

 can now answer confidently. Such and such a plant 

 is what it is in virtue of such and such ancestral 

 conditions, and it has been altered thus and thus by 

 these and those variations in habit or environment. 

 Every plant or animal, therefore, becomes for us a 

 puzzle to be explained, a problem to be solved, a 

 hieroglyphic inscription to be carefully deciphered. 

 In the following pages, I have taken some half- 

 dozen of familiar English weeds or flowers, and tried 

 thus to make them yield up the secret of their own 

 origin. Each of them is ultimately descended from 

 the common central ancestor of the entire flower- 

 ing group of plants; and each of them has acquired 

 every new diversity of structure or appearance for 

 some definite and useful purpose. As a rule, traces 

 ofall the various stages through which every spe- 

 cies has passed are still visibly imprinted upon the 

 very face of the existing forms : and one only re- 

 quires a little care and ingenuity, a little use of com- 

 parison and analogyj to unravel by their own aid 

 the story of their own remoter pedigree. This is 

 the method which I have here followed in the pa- 

 pers that deal with the various modifications of the 

 daisy, of the grasses, of the lilies, of the strawberry, 

 and of the whole rose family. 



Again, not only has each English plant a gen- 

 eral history as a species, but it has also a separate 

 history as a member of the British flora. Besides 

 the question how any particular flower or fruit came 

 to exist at all, we have to account for the question 

 how it came to exist here and now in this, that, or 

 the other part of the British Islands. For, of 

 course, all plants are not to be found in all parts of 

 the world, and theu- distribution over its surface 

 has to be explained on historical grounds iust as 

 a future ethnologist would have to explain the oc- 

 currence of isolated French communities in Lower 

 Canada and Mauritius, of African negroes in Ja- 

 maica and Brazil, or of Chinese coolies in San Fran- 

 cisco and the Australian colonies. In this respect, 

 our English plants open out a series of interesting 

 problems for the botanical researcher ; because we 

 happen to possess a veiy mixed and fragmentary 

 flora, made up to a great extent of waifs and strays 

 from at least three large distinct continental groups, 

 besides several casual colonists. Thus while at Kil- 

 lamey we get a few rare Spanish or Portuguese 



types, in Caithness and the Highlands we get a few 

 rare Alpine or Arctic types ; and while in Norfolk 

 and Suffolk we find some central European strag- 

 glers, the ponds of the Hebrides are actually occu- 

 pied by at least one American pond- weed, its seeds 

 having been wafted over by westerly breezes, or 

 carried unconsciously by water-birds in the mud 

 and ooze which clung accidentally to their webbed 

 feet. Moreover, we know that at no very remote 

 period, geologically speaking, Britain was covered 

 by a single great sheet of glaciers, like that which 

 now covers almost all Greenland : and we may 

 therefore conclude with certainty that every plant 

 at present in the country has entered it from one 

 quarter and another at a date posterior to that great 

 lifeless epoch. This, then, gives rise to a second 

 set of problems, the problems connected with the 

 presence in England of certain stray local types, 

 Alpine or Arctic, southern or transatlantic, Euro- 

 pean or Asiatic. Questions of this sort I have 

 raised and endeavored to answer with regard to 

 two rare English plants in the papers on the hairy 

 spurge and the mountain tulip. 



In short, these little essays deal, first, with the 

 evolution of certain plant types in general ; and, 

 secondly, with their presence as naturalized citizens 

 of our own restricted, petty, insular floral common- 

 wealth. 



Record op Family Faculties: Consisting 

 of Tabular Forms and Directions for en- 

 tering Data, with an Explanatory Pref- 

 ace. Pp. 64. Price, 90 cents. Also, 

 Life-History Album. Pp. 170. Price, 

 $1.25. By Francis Galton, F. R. S. 

 London : Macmillan & Co. 



The " Record of Family Faculties " " is 

 designed for those who care to forecast the 

 mental and bodily faculties of their children, 

 and to further the science of heredity," be- 

 ing arranged for entering descriptive and 

 historical data in regard to the fourteen di- 

 rect ancestors which constitute the three 

 generations immediately preceding a family 

 of children. 



Space is allowed also for descriptions 

 of brothers and sisters of these ancestors, 

 and of other relatives about whom little is 

 known. Some of the entries called for are : 

 " Mode of Life, so far as affecting Growth 

 or Health ; Bodily and Mental Powers, and 

 Energy, if much above or below the Aver- 

 age ; Favorite Pursuits ; Minor Ailments, 

 and Graver Illnesses; Cause and Date of 

 Death, and Age at Death." In the preface 

 Mr. Galton rebukes the vanity of those who 

 parade 'the fact of their descent from some 

 distant, illustrious ancestor, and remarks 

 that " one ancestor, who lived at the time 

 of the Norman Conquest, twenty-four gen- 

 erations back, contributes (on the supposi- 



