168 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



ancestry. The flowers are almost identical in hops and 

 nettles, as well as in their yet humbler ally the pellitory 

 Solomon's ' hyssop that springeth out of the wall,' whose 

 English name is a mere corruption of parietaria, just 

 as pilgrim is of peregrinus. In all three the male and 

 female blossoms are distinct. In all three they consist, 

 among the males at least, of four or five green leaflets, 

 enclosing an equal number of elastic stamens. Contrary 

 to the usual rule in flowers, the stamens are arranged 

 opposite to the calyx scales, instead of alternately with 

 them a fact which shows that a row of petals, once 

 intermediate between stamens and calyx, has been sup- 

 pressed by disuse, owing to the acquisition by the flowers 

 of the habit of wind-fertilisation. For, normally speaking, 

 all the successive rows in flowers are arranged alternately 

 with one another, as anybody may see in a moment by 

 looking at a fuchsia or a strawberry blossom ; but when 

 the petals are lost through change of habit the other 

 whorls appear to stand opposite to one another, though 

 the real nature of their arrangement is always pre- 

 served for us in intermediate forms, with very small 

 petals, which are occasionally entirely wanting. By 

 these and numerous other minute agreements in points of 

 structure, the nettles, hops, and pellitories are all seen to 

 be descendants of a single common ancestor, which had 

 already lost its petals and had separated its sexes in 

 different flowers, but had not yet, of course, acquired any 

 of the special characteristics that mark off the nettles, 

 the hops, and the pellitories from one another. 



On the other hand, the hop itself must very early 

 have begun its own special differentiation from this old 

 central generalised form ; or else it would not now 



