i:6 COLIN CLOUTS CALENDAR. 



analogy of this other old-fashioned garden flower, the 

 common nasturtium or Indian cress. 



In the nasturtium, you see at once that the upper 

 lobe of the calyx is prolonged behind into a deep and 

 pointed spur ; and you have probably bitten off one of 

 these spurs at some time or other and have found that 

 it contained a large supply of rather pungent but very 

 luscious honey. At least, it seems pungent to our clumsy 

 taste, because we have to cut or bruise the tissues of the 

 plant in order to get at it. Now, if you bend back the 

 spur of the nasturtium so as to make it touch the flower- 

 stalk, you have artificially imitated the arrangement in 

 the scarlet geranium ; only that in the geranium the two 

 parts have actually coalesced, for a reason which I shall 

 try to explain a little later. First, however, let us sec 

 how the scarlet pelargonium itself got developed out of 

 a primitive ancestor, something like our own little pink 

 herb-robert. A technical book of botany will tell you, 

 after its dogmatic fashion, that the genus geranium is 

 distinguished from the genus pelargonium by these marks 

 or differentiating peculiarities : the geraniums have 

 regular flowers, ten stamens, and five honey-bearing 

 glands on the disk, and they are natives of almost all 

 temperate climates, northern or southern ; the pelar- 

 goniums have irregular flowers, with tw^o upper petals 

 different from the remainder, a spurred honey-bearing 

 pouch to the calyx, no glands on the disk, and only 

 about five stamens instead of ten, and they are confined 

 (in their wild state) to the Cape of Good Hope and a few 

 neighbouring regions. 



Now all these facts are very significant : they show 

 that the pelargoniums are a highly evolved and special- 



