The Daisy's Pedigree. 



31 



able erudition, every time they open their mouths, 

 they imagine that everybody else must be ignorant of 

 anything which he doesn't expressly state ; as though 

 you might never talk of a railway journey without 

 giving at full the theory of kinetic energy as applied 

 to the coal in the furnace. For their sake, then, I 

 must add that, when the daisy's ancestors had reached 

 a level of development equivalent to that of the heath 

 and the Canterbury bell, they differed in one respect 

 from them just as the primrose still does. In the 

 heath and the harebell, the stamens remain quite 

 separate from the tube formed by the petals ; but in 

 the primrose and the daisy the stalks of the stamens 

 (filaments, the technical botanists 

 call them) have coalesced with the 

 petals, so that the pollen seems to 

 hang out in little bags from the 

 walls of the tube itself. This is 

 a further advance in the direction 

 of specialised arrangements for 

 insect-fertilisation ; and it shows 

 very simply the sort of cross- 

 connections which we often get 

 among plants or animals. For while the daisy is 

 more like the Canterbury bell in the shape of its 

 corolla, it is more like the primrose in the arrange- 



FlG. II. 

 Section of floret of Daisy. 



