12 Flowers and their Pedigrees, 



which now crop up about ever}' part of its form or 

 structure. And just as surely as in sur\eying Eng- 

 land we can set down Stonehenge and Avcbury to 

 its prehistoric inhabitants, Watling Street and the 

 Roman Wall to its southern conquerors, Salisbury 

 and Warwick to mediicval priests and soldiers, Liver- 

 f)ool and Manchester to modem coal and cotton — 

 just so surely in surxeying a flower or an insect can 

 we set down each particular point to some special 

 epoch in its ancestral development. This new view 

 of nature invests every part of it with a charm and 

 hidden meaning which ver\* few among ui^ have ever 

 suspected before. 



Pull your daisy to pieces carefully, and you will 

 see that, instead of being a single flower, as we 

 generally^ suppose at a rough glance, it is in reality a 

 whole head of closely packed and ve:y tiny flowers 

 seated together upon a soft fleshy disk. Of these 

 there are two kinds. The outer florets consist each 

 of a single, long, white, pink-tipped ray, looking very 

 much like a solitary petal : the inner ones consist 

 each of a small, golden, bell-shaped blossom, with 

 stamens and pistil in the centre, surrounded by a 

 yellow corolla much like that of a Canterbury bell in 

 shape, though differing greatly from it in size and 

 colour. The daisy, in fact, is one of the great family 



