WHITE VARIETIES OF BRITISH PLANTS 145 



plants of this kinde in Essex neere unto Heningham 

 Castle." 



A moment's reflection will remind us that these white 

 specimens of flowers are usually of plants whose floral 

 colouring is blue or red, and seldom or never yellow. 

 Who, for instance, ever found a white variety of butter- 

 cup or wild daffodil or St John's wort ? Among the 

 thousands of celandines that star our hedge-banks in 

 early spring a white specimen is unknown. Later on 

 the kingcups will be golden in the swampy meadows, 

 and the Iris or yellow flag will put forth its blossoms on 

 the banks of the river, but you will search in vain for 

 a white specimen. The coarse yellow Composites, the 

 ragworts and hawkweeds, which add such brilliancy to 

 our hedgerows in late summer and autumn, never in- 

 dulge in such vagaries as to assume a white habit. And 

 the reason is not far to seek, if we accept the theory 

 of our masters. The earliest petals, it seems, were 

 flattened stamens, and since stamens are mostly yellow, 

 the flowers were yellow likewise. Then some of them 

 became white ; after that, in the course of ages, a few 

 of them grew to be red or purple ; and finally a com- 

 paratively small number acquired various shades of 

 lilac, mauve, violet or blue. So wrote Grant Allen in 

 his interesting book on the colours of flowers. But, as 

 he points out, plants, like men, sometimes show a 

 tendency to fall back to a lower stage of development. 

 This tendency, when it affects only a few individuals, 

 may be spoken of as reversion or relapse. Now 

 primary yellow flowers, like the buttercups and poten- 

 tillas, show little or no tendency in a state of nature to 

 vary in colour, for the simple reason that they have 

 never passed through any earlier stage to which they 



