17 o COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



Kentish hop-^ardcns. If you run your finger and 

 thumb upwards along the branches or young sprays, 

 against the grain, you will find that these prickles cut 

 like a rasp ; while if you look at a wild hop festooning a 

 hedge, in free luxuriance, in and out among the equally 

 prickly goose-grasses and other climbers, you will recog- 

 nise at once that the hooks have been developed by 

 natural selection for the same purpose as the tendrils of 

 the vine and the pea, or as the little sucker-like rootlets 

 of the ivy. Every climbing plant must needs possess 

 some such means of clinging to its chosen support ; and 

 the particular means it happens in each case to develop 

 will depend entirely upon the nature of its organisation 

 before it began to acquire the twining habit. In the 

 vine and the pea, tendrils readily grew out of branches 

 or leaf-stalks ; in the hop and the goose-grass, hooks 

 were more easily produced out of pre-existent hairs and 

 asperities still retained in their original form by other 

 descendants of the common ancestor. 



It is the flowers of the hop, however, that give it its 

 chief interest in the eyes of bibulous humanity ; and the 

 flowering mechanism is the part of its organisation in 

 which the plant most widely departs from the norma of 

 its race. On the specialisation of this part, in fact, it has 

 expended its chief attention. In pellitory a few of the 

 blossoms still remain hermaphrodite, with stamens and 

 ovaries in the same flower ; in most of the nettles all the 

 blossoms are separately either male or female, though 

 both kinds grow together on the same plant ; but in the 

 hop, as in the commonest stinging-nettle, the two kinds 

 of flowers are altogether divided, ea^h individual bine 

 bearing on its clusters only one sort or the other. The 



