HIGHNESS AND LOWNESS IN PLANTS 445 



sexual organs and their accessories that all the Nat. Orders 

 are defined. The organs of locomotion afford the Botanist 

 no characters, those of digestion next to none : and the 

 mode after which the various component parts of a com- 

 pound body (a plant) are arranged is valuable only for the 

 3 highest groups, Monocot, Dicot, and Acot, and not absolute 

 even amongst these. Generally speaking, in Botany highness 

 and lowness are synonymous with complexity and simphcity 

 of structure. I can hardly conceive either simplicity or 

 complexity of one particular organ indicating the rank of 

 a being in the scale of creation. 



November 1851. 



Co'prosma is almost peculiar to N. Zealand, and for the 

 life of me I do not know how to draw the line between there 

 being only one species or 28 ! — it covers the country in 

 every form of herb, bush and tree, from sea to mountain 

 top, — but it is no worse than Eubus, Willow or Rosa are 

 in Gt. Britain, and on the whole I ignore Bory's theory .^ 

 Generally speaking, the N. Zealand species are as well or 

 better marked than the European, or the Austrahan, where 

 Eucalyptus and various other genera are not to be surpassed 

 in Protean dispositions. For the rest, recent discoveries 

 rather tend to ally the N. Zeald. Flora with the Australian 

 — ^though there is enough affinity with extratropical S. 

 America to be very remarkable and far more than can be 

 accounted for by any known laws of migration. I am 

 becoming slowly more convinced of the probability of the 

 Southern Flora being a fragmentary one — all that remains 

 of a great Southern continent. A second species of the 

 otherwise strictly great S. American genus Calceolaria has 

 tiu-ned up in N. Zealand, and of the two only genera of N. 

 Zeald. Leguminosae, one, a tree (Edwardsia), is common to 

 Chili and N. Zealand and to no other countries — the other 

 is confined to N.Z. and allied to nothing. Several of the 

 truly mid grasses are European I think, and yet not found 

 in Australia ! 



Hitcham: June 1854. 



Will you oblige me with your ideas of what constitutes 

 highness and lowness in the Animal Kingdom ? e.g. in 



1 See p. 439. 



