48 COLIK CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



duced to assume bright hues under proper circumstances, 

 just as our gardeners have made the leaves of geraniums 

 and many other plants do so since the taste for colored 

 foliage plants set in. Besides, such bright hues are 

 especially apt to appear in the neighborhood of the fruits 

 or flowers, and do often appear there without any special 

 reason. If, then, in the wild state, they ever happened 

 to show themselves in such a manner as to benefit the 

 plant by attracting birds or insects, we may be pretty 

 sure that the tendency once set up would continue and 

 increase from generation to generation. As a matter of 

 fact, it is manifest that some familiar fruits and flowers 

 only show the tendency even now in a very nascent or 

 incipient form, while others show it in a highly de- 

 veloped degree. For example, in peaches and apples 

 only the sunny side is colored at all, and that in a very 

 irregular and patchy manner ; whereas oranges are fully 

 colored in every part. On the other hand, pears as a 

 rule hardly show any signs of coloring beyond a slight 

 browning of the peel on one side. Cherries give us 

 every stage from the merely pink-cheeked whitehearts, 

 to the deep and uniform red of the morella. So, too, 

 among flowers, we may compare the almost accidental 

 pinkiness of the rays in a daisy with the full rich purple 

 of a cineraria. These intermediate cases help perhaps to 

 show us how color first begins to gather in some particu- 

 lar part, and so forms the groundwork upon which 

 selective action may gradually be exerted. It is not diffi- 

 cult to see how the first few faint streaks of red may be- 

 gin to dapple the cheek of a ripening fruit, just as they 

 dapple the surface of autumn leaves ; and yet when that 

 step has once been taken, it is easy to fancy the subse- 

 quent stages by which the color becomes intensified from 

 year to year, through the constant preference shown by 



