DOG-ROSE AND BRAMBLES. 129 



in scent of all our English wild roses. Was it merely by 

 way of distinction from the garden rose that it got its 

 name, or was it to mark it off from the rarer sweetbriar, 

 whose leaves are protectively dotted with little rusty- 

 coloured glands, which give out a delicious aromatic per- 

 fume when rubbed between the fingers ? I hardly know 

 which explanation is the more likely : for the common 

 double rose of our gardens, which is probably a distorted 

 variety of the French wild rose from the Mediterranean 

 region, with its central stamens overfed into irregular 

 and supernumerary petals, has certainly been grown for 

 ornament since a very early period in English flower- 

 beds. From that South European stock we get our 

 cabbage-rose and our moss-roses ; the China roses 

 descend from an Asiatic species ; while the dear old- 

 fashioned Scotch roses, too often turned out of our 

 gardens now by the new-fangled oriental varieties, are 

 cultivated forms of the little burnet rose, that grows 

 abundantly in sandy districts on our own western sea- 

 board. All of them, however, will produce hybrids 

 readily with one another, and with various newer Asiatic 

 or American kinds : and it is selected varieties of these 

 hybrids that make up the mass of our modern over- 

 civilised garden strains. 



Indeed, people generally have very little idea how 

 many distinct species of plants or animals exist in each 

 great group, or how absolutely they all merge into each 

 other for the most part by insensible gradations. It is 

 the inadequate recognition of such facts that makes us 

 less able to realise the steps by which species change from 

 form to form as circumstances demand of them. Almost 

 all the most familiar animals happen to be very distinct 



K 



