4 Mr. Grant Aliens Botanical Fables 



figure made by evolutionary argument, not to say by the 

 doctrine of evolution itself, when thus brought within 

 the scope of ordinary vision. 1 Apart from science, too, 

 the objects to which he leads us may serve to enliven 

 many a summer ramble, and his method, though we 

 may differ widely from his conclusions, will, at least, 

 teach us to use both our eyes and our brains. Which, 

 being premised, let us stroll out with him into the 

 country. 



One of his first texts is afforded by a Strawberry a 

 wild Strawberry growing by a lane side. 2 He undertakes 

 to tell us in this, as in all his other instances, how such 

 a product of nature came to its present form. No one, 

 I suppose, in these days of popular lectures and elemen- 

 tary hand-books, needs to be told that what we call the 

 fruit of the Strawberry is not the fruit, but the receptacle 

 or cushion on which the fruit is placed, the fruit being 

 in reality the hard little brown nuts which, if we conde- 

 scend to notice them at all, we usually call seeds. But 

 while the fruit remains to ordinary ideas unfruitlike 

 the receptacle becomes fleshy and juicy and red, and, 

 acquires the flavour which induced old Isaac Walton 

 to say, or at least to endorse the saying, that God could 

 without doubt have made a better berry, but equally 

 without doubt God never did. Now how comes it, asks 

 Mr. Allen, that the Strawberry has developed the habit 

 of producing this succulent and conspicuous cushion? 

 It was not so from the beginning : this was not the 

 "primitive form." The primeval Strawberry fruits were 

 crowded together on a green, dry, inedible receptacle. 

 Whence the change? "Why does the Strawberry 

 develop this large mass of apparently useless matter ? " 



The answer follows unhesitatingly. For a plant with 



1 The works I shall chiefly refer to are The Evolutionist at Large 

 (Chatto and Windus, 1881) ; Vignettes from Nature (Chatto and 

 Windus, 1881); Flowers and their Pedigrees (Longmans, 1883); 

 and certain articles in Knowledge, incorporated in Nature Studies 

 (Longmans). 



2 Evolutionist at Large, p. 16. 



