flfer. (Brant alien's Botanical fables 



" Every one of these English plants and weeds has a long and 

 eventful story of its own. In the days before the illuminating 

 doctrine of evolution had been preached, all we could say about 

 them was that they possessed such and such a shape, and size, and 

 colour : and if we had been asked why they were not rounder or 

 bigger or bluer than they actually are, we could give no sufficient 

 reason, except that they were made so. But since the great prin- 

 ciple of descent with modification has reduced the science of life 

 from chaos to rational order, we are able to do much more than 

 that. We can now answer confidently, Such and such a plant is 

 what it is in virtue of such and such ancestral conditions, and it has 

 been altered thus and thus by these and those variations in habit 

 or environment " (Grant Allen, Flowers and their Pedigrees, p. 2). 



4 ' The relation of our existing vegetation to preceding floras is 

 beyond the scope of our present inquiry : it has been frequently 

 made the subject of exposition, but to handle it requires a more 

 Hvely imagination than I can lay claim to, or perhaps than it is 

 desirable to employ in any strictly scientific investigation " {Address 

 to Biological Section, British Association, 1 886. By William 

 Carruthers, F.R.S., F.G.S., President of the Section). 



THERE is a very active and very influential school of 

 philosophers at the present day who could invent for 

 themselves no better designation than "peripatetics." 

 Not Peripatetics, be it observed, in the traditional and 

 transferred sense : Aristotle they repudiate ; and if he 

 had the opportunity, the repudiation would probably 

 be mutual. But, according to the original and literal 

 meaning of the word, they are "walking" sages. They 

 stroll out to the fields, or the moors, or the sea-shore, 

 and every object they meet beast, bird, insect, or 

 weed furnishes them with a text wherewith to enforce 

 the great creed formulated by exact science and exact 

 thought concerning the origin of the heavens and the 

 I. 



