98 NATURE STUDIES. 



THE ORIGIN OF BUTTERCUPS. 



BY GRANT ALLEN. 



HERE in my hand I hold a solitary little golden 

 buttercup, picked this morning in an autumn meadow, 

 but still as bright and sturdy as though it had grown 

 up in warmer days beneath the sunny skies of June. 

 Common and familiar as it is, the buttercup is yet a 

 very interesting flower from the point of view of its 

 origin and evolution. Not that it is a highly- evolved 

 or very singular blossom, with a long and intricate 

 history at its back, like some of the orchids and snap- 

 dragons, whose complexity almost defies explanation ; 

 on the contrary, the importance of the buttercup in 

 the eyes of the historical botanist is mainly due to the 

 extreme simplicity of its typical arrangement. It is 

 a very early type of plant, which has scarcely under- 

 gone any alteration from the form it must have 

 acquired already many millions of years ago. There 

 are other flowers of the same family, such as the 

 larkspur, the columbine, and the monkshood, which 

 still bear obvious traces of being derived from an 

 ancestor exactly like the buttercup, but which have 

 diverged widely from the original stock in their 

 curious, irregular flowers, sometimes spurred, some- 

 times hooded, and sometimes so altered from the 

 primitive radial shape as to be scarcely recognisable. 

 What makes our buttercup so interesting, on the 



