Some Wayside Problems 55 



stem are three or four leaves of unequal size, and 

 three other leaves springing from the root down below. 

 These various appendages are the raw material to 

 which the plant is confined for its purposes of adorn- 

 ment, and it uses them thus. In place of two flowers 

 on each stalk, the exceptional specimens develop 

 one only, of far greater size. This one flower is 

 made double. The doubling of flowers, as is well 

 known, is effected by changing stamens into petals, 

 and a flower that does this dooms itself to sterility. 

 The Avens, however, seems resolved that if it makes 

 this sacrifice it will have a quid pro quo in the way 

 of beauty, and it accordingly colours its now abundant 

 petals far more brilliantly than seems to be their 

 nature, so brilliantly that they are often as ruddy as 

 a Rose. Not content with this, it draws its leaves 

 together, bringing up not only those on the stalk, 

 but some from the root, to make up the orthodox 

 number of five, 1 and bringing them approximately to 

 the .same size and form, arranges them something in 

 the fashion of an Elizabethan ruff round its altered 

 flower. The effect is most artistic, and few who 

 are not botanists would imagine that the quaint prim 

 little plant with delicately-tinted blossom could be 

 of the same species as the lax and straggling growths, 

 with dusky nodding flowers, which surround it. Here 

 then is an instance in which development takes place 

 in a given direction at a bound, and apparently on 

 a plan. Moreover, the individuals which exhibit 

 such development being sterile, can do nothing towards 

 handing on the tendency. Yet every season fresh 

 examples of it occur. In some cases the development 

 goes still further, the pistil, whose proper function is 

 to be a seed vessel, changing into a stalk and grow- 

 ing up through the transformed flower, with leaves 

 upon it, and another attempt at a blossom up aloft. 



1 Such a plant as the Geum has 5 petals and 5 sepals. As a 

 general law, exogenous plants adopt the numbers 5 or 4 for their 

 various parts, and endogenous plants the number 3. 



