200 Flaivers and their Pedigrees, 



marked trunk, while the fruit itself is much larger, 

 sweeter, and more brightly coloured than the ancestral 

 sloe. But these changes have easily been produced 

 by long tillage and constant selection of the best 

 fruiters through many ages of human agriculture. So, 

 again, if we ask what is the origin of our pretty old- 

 fashioned Scotch roses, the botanists will tell us in 

 like manner that they are double varieties of the wild 

 burnet-rose which grows beside the long tidal lochs of 

 the Scotch Highlands, or clambers over the heathy 

 cliffs of Cumberland and Yorkshire. The wild form 

 of the burnet-rose has only five simple petals, like 

 our own common sweet-briar ; but all wild flowers 

 when carefully planted in a rich soil show a tendency 

 to double their petals ; and, by selecting for many 

 generations those burnet-roses which showed this 

 doubling tendency in the highest degree, our florists 

 have at last succeeded in producing the pretty Scotch 

 roses which may still be found (thank Heaven !) in 

 many quiet cottage gardens, though ousted from 

 fashionable society by the Marshal Niels and Gloires 

 de Dijon of modern scientific horticulturists. 



Now, if we push our inquiry a step further back, 

 we shall find that this which is true of cultivated 

 plants in their descent from wild parent stocks, is 

 true also of the parent stocks themselves in their 



