146 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



marks a step in advance, since it allows many seeds 

 to be impregnated by a single act of pollination. The 

 result of all these improvements, carried further by 

 some lilies than by others, is that the family has 

 absolutely outstripped all others of the trinary class 

 in the race for the possession of the earth, and has 

 now occupied all the most favourable positions in 

 every part of the world. While the alismas and their 

 allies have been so crowded out that they now linger 

 only in a few ponds, marshes, and swamps, to which 

 the more recent lily tribe have not yet had time 

 fully to adapt themselves, the true lilies and their yet 

 more advanced descendants have taken seizin of 

 every climate and every zone upon our planet, and 

 are to be found in every possible position, from 

 the arborescent yuccas and huge agaves of the 

 tropics to the w^ild hyacinths of our English wood- 

 lands and the graceful asphodels of the Mediter- 

 ranean hill-sides. 



The lilies themselves, again, do not all stand on 

 one plane of homogeneous evolution. There are 

 different grades of development still surviving among 

 the class itself. The little yellow gagea (fig. 34) which 

 grows sparingly in sandy English fields may be taken 

 as a very fair representative of the simplest and earliest 

 true lily type. It bears a small bunch of little golden 



