Pitcher Plants 5 



ship yet sufficient generic difference ; curiously enough, it is 

 the flower of Sarracenia which is the more specialised. 

 Each is solitary upon its lofty stalk, the long dull-red 

 petals quite surpassed in conspicuousness by the curiously- 

 dilated style, recalling the peltate leaf of the common 

 Indian Cress (Tropceoluni) , which climbs over so many 

 cottage walls, or in dwarf forms brightens the garden 

 border. In Darlingtonia the style merely shows the faintest 

 beginnings of such an arrangement. From this one of the 

 perplexities of evolution becomes evident ; we often cannot 

 say that one plant is more evolved than another as a 

 whole ; but only it may be on this or that respect, e.g. the 

 form of the leaf in Darlingtonia, of style in Sarracenia. 



Origin of Darlingtonia Pitchers. But how should such 

 a change come about? the thoughtful student will ask, so 

 beginning to raise all the enigmas of evolution. Was it 

 by change of climate and soil? or by spontaneous internal 

 variations, trifling differences of the kind visible in every 

 patch of seedlings, of which some, useful in some way to 

 the plant, helped their lucky possessors, which therefore 

 survived while their fellows died, and transmitted these to 

 a new series of similar divergent seedlings, which again 

 had to struggle for life in the same way? Thus we see 

 how in course of generations we might obtain important and 

 obvious differences from the simpler parent form ; and this 

 of course would have been Darwin's view ; it is a special case 

 of his famous theory of " the Origin of Species, by means of 

 Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Fortunate Varia- 

 tions in the Struggle for Life," while the speculation as 

 to the possible but unknown influence of climate and soil 

 represents the position of the earlier evolutionists. Lamarck, 

 Erasmus Darwin, etc. Here, then, at the very outset of 

 our studies, the riddle of origins comes up and refuses to 

 admit itself fully solved. For though each of these 



