204 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



green bed or receptacle on which the Httle seeds ' are 

 seated does not swell out (as in the true strawberry) 

 into a sweet, pulpy, red mass, but remains a mere dry 

 stalk for the tiny bunch of small hard inedible nuts. 

 The barren strawberry, indeed, as we saw in an earlier 

 paper, is really an intermediate stage between the 

 other potentillas and the true eatable strawberry ; or, 

 to put it more correctly, the eatable strawberry is a 

 white-flowered potentilla which has acquired the habit 

 of producing a sweet and bright-coloured fruit instead 

 of a few small dry seeds. Since we have got to 

 understand the rationale of this first and simplest 

 transformation, we have now a clue by which we may 

 interpret almost all the subsequent modifications of 

 the rose family, and I must therefore be permitted 

 here briefly to recapitulate the chief points we have 

 already proved in this matter. 



The true strawberry, we saw, resembles the barren 

 stravv'berry in every particular except in its fruit. It 

 is a mere slightly divergent variety of that particular 

 species of potentilla, though the great importance of 

 the variety from man's practical point of view causes 

 us to give it a separate name, and has even wrongly 



' Botanically and structurally these seeds, as we always call them, 

 are really fruits ; but the point is a purely technical one, with which it 

 is quite unnecessary to bore the reader. I only mention it here to 

 anticipate the sharp eyes of botanical critics. 



