163 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



the wild state, dying down again entirely with the ap- 

 proach of winter. I know nothing more marvellous in 

 the way of growth than the rapidity with which these 

 lithe bines curl spirally up the bare poles in early 

 summer at first on the strength of material laid by in 

 their buried root-stocks, but afterward by the rapid as- 

 similation of aerial food from the surrounding atmos- 

 phere. As one watches the slender young sprays and 

 the graceful five-lobed heart-shaped leaves, rendered so 

 singularly like those of the wholly unconnected grape- 

 vine by exact similarity of situation and function, one 

 can almost see them with the eye of scientific faith 

 drinking in the carbon visibly from the air around by 

 the numerous thirsty pores on their under surface. 



Everything here has been obviously designed for the 

 climbing habit. The rough hairs which in the nettle 

 serve as glandular reservoirs for a deterrent poison are 

 transformed in the hop, by a thickening of their base, 

 into recurved prickles, which serve as hooks to aid the 

 plant in hanging to the poles, or rather, in the wild 

 state, in clambering over small trees and hedgerows ; for 

 of course the original evolving bines could never have 

 contemplated their descendants' future domestication 

 in Kentish hop-gardens. If you run your finger and 

 thumb upward along the branches or young sprays, 

 against the grain, you will find that these prickles cut 

 like a rasp ; while if you look at a wild hop festooning a 

 hedge, in free luxuriance, in and out among the equally 

 prickly goose-grasses and other climbers, you will recog- 

 nize at once that the hooks have been developed by nat- 

 ural selection for the same purpose as the tendrils of the 

 vine and the pea, or as the little sucker-like rootlets of 

 the ivy. Every climbing plant must needs possess some 

 such means of clinging to its chosen support ; and the 



