160 OOLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



hops. Passing the bines on my way down to the river 

 trout are rising well in the shade this week I notice 

 that the young cones have now just opened, and that the 

 little green flowers are now fully expanded in good time 

 for an early harvest. The fly that threatened such evil 

 things a few weeks ago disappeared suddenly with the 

 wet weather ; and now, if all goes well, the hops at least 

 may prove a successful vintage amid all the failures of 

 this disastrous year. With tine weather in future, we 

 may perhaps hope to begin picking by the last days of 

 August. 



No plant grown for economical purposes is more 

 graceful and beautiful in its mode of growth than the 

 hop. It stands alone among the nettle tribe in its twin- 

 ing habit ; and, indeed, it has diverged so widely from 

 all the rest of its kin, in pursuance of this abnormal 

 trick, that it now occupies a special genus all to itself ; 

 in other words, it has broken so completely with its an- 

 cestral type that no intermediate links at present remain 

 to connect it directly with its nearest congeners. Noth- 

 ing could be more unlike at first sight than a lissom 

 creeper such as the hop, and a stiff erect roadside weed 

 such as the stinging-nettle. Yet both are immediately 

 descended, at no great distance of time, from a single 

 common progenitor ; and both retain in a very marked 

 degree all the most distinctive features of underlying 

 structure which they inherit together from their similar 

 ancestry. The flowers are almost identical in hops and 

 nettles, as well as in their yet humbler ally the pellitory 

 Solomon's "hyssop that springeth out of the wall," 

 whose English name is a mere corruption of parietaria, 

 just as pilgrim is of peregrinus. In all three the male 

 and female blossoms are distinct. In all three they con- 

 sist > among the males at least, of four or five green 



