Cleavers. 



103 



pass through a first simple shape which helps us to 

 picture to ourselves what they once were — what, for 

 example, the ancestors of the goose-grass looked like, 

 long before. they were goose-grasses at all. Now here 

 in my hand I have got a young speci- 

 men in its very earliest stage, which 

 closely reproduces the primitive type 

 of its first progenitors, a million ages 

 since. Goose-grass is an annual weed : 

 it dies down utterly every autumn, 

 and only reproduces itself by seed 

 in the succeeding spring ; but this 

 year the weather has been so excep- 

 tionally warm and summerlikc that 



thousands of young plants have Seedling of Cleavers. 



sprouted from the seed ever since Christmas ; and 

 among them is the specimen which I have just 

 picked, and which you may have for examination if 

 you will take the trouble. Look into it, and you 

 will see that its two first leaves are quite unlike 

 the upper ones— a phenomenon which frequently 

 occurs in seedling plants, and with which you are 

 probably familiar in the case of the pea and of the 

 garden bean. But this difference is always a differ- 

 ence in one direction only ; the first leaves which 

 come out of the seed are invariably simpler in shape 



MG. 23. 



