228 Flowers and their Pedigrees, 



separate flowers, but gathered into pretty, spiky 

 antler-like branches, which contrast admirably with 

 the dark green of the foliage, and so attain the 

 requisite degree of conspicuousness. This habit of 

 clustering the blossoms which are individually dwarfed 

 and stunted may be looked upon as the first stage of 

 degradation in the roses. The seeds of the meadow- 

 sweet are very minute, dry, and inedible. They show 

 no special adaptation to any particular mode of ad- 

 vanced dispersion, but trust merely to chance as they 

 drop from the dry capsule upon the ground beneath. 



A far deeper stage of degradation is exhibited by 

 the little salad-burnet of our meadows, which has lost 

 the bright petals of its flowers altogether, and has 

 taken to the wasteful and degenerate habit of fertili- 

 sation by means of the wind. We can understand the 

 salad-burnet better if we look first at common agri- 

 mony, another little field weed about a foot high, with 

 which most country people are familiar ; for, though 

 agrimony is not itself an example of degradation, its 

 arrangement leads us on gradually to the lower types. 

 It has a number of small yellow flowers like those of 

 the cinquefoil ; only, instead of standing singly on 

 separate flower stalks, they are all arranged together 

 on a common terminal spike, in the same way as in a 

 hyacinth or a gladiolus. Now, agrimony is fertilised by 



