io Mr. Grant Aliens Botanical Fables 



The Arum is a very old-world and primitive growth. 

 How did it so early in the history of the earth pick 

 up what Captain Costigan would call this "aisy 

 stratagem," which long subsequent ages of develop- 

 ment in higher creatures have not sufficed to elude? 

 But in the second place, is this a piece of fact or a 

 piece of fancy? Are Arums usually, or ever, found 

 to grow out from among the skeletons of robins or 

 of shrews? I commend the question to the experi- 

 mental zeal of my readers; the research requires 

 only a strong knife or a small spud. 1 



From fruits and flowers let us turn to the leaves 

 of plants, of which Mr. Allen speaks in connexion 

 with Buttercups. 2 Holding up one of these familiar 

 flowers for our perusal, he thus directs attention to 

 the leaves: "These, one notices at once, are raised 

 on long stalks and deeply divided into several 

 segments. . . . Now such a complex leaf as this shows 

 by its very nature that it must be the product of 

 considerable previous development. All very early 

 leaves are quite simple and rounded ; it is only by 

 slow steps that a leaf thus gets broken up into many 

 divided segments. . . . There are some other Butter- 

 cups, such as the Ivy-leaved Crowfoot, which creeps 

 along the mud of ditches, or the Lesser Celandine, 

 which springs in the meadows in early April, whose 

 leaves are entire and undivided; . . . but both these 

 plants, having plenty of room to spread in the un- 

 occupied fields of spring or the unappropriated ditches, 

 have never felt the necessity for subdivision into 

 minute segments. They have free access to the air 

 and sunlight, and so they can assimilate to their 

 hearts' content the carbon of which their tissues are 

 built up. It is otherwise, however, when similar plants 

 push out into new situations less fully supplied. . . . 

 The Buttercups have taken to growing in the open 



1 See more on this subject in the Essay, How Theories are 

 Manufactured. 



2 Nature Studies } p. 99. 



