A Family History. 231 



adaptation is itself of the nature of a degradation, 

 because it is a lapse from a higher to a lower grade 

 of organisation— it is like a civilised man taking to 

 a Robinson Crusoe existence, and dressing in fresh 

 skins. Indeed, so largely has the salad-burnet lost 

 the distinctive features of its relatives, the true roses, 

 that no one but a skilled botanist would ever have 

 guessed it to be a rose at all. In outer appearance it 

 is much more like the little flat grassy plantains 

 which grow as weeds by every roadside ; and it is 

 only a minute consideration of its structure and 

 analogies which can lead us to recognise it as really 

 and essentially a very degenerate and inconspicuous 

 rose. Yet its ancestors must once have been true 

 roses, for all that, with coloured petals and all the 

 rosaceous characteristics, since it stil^ retains many 

 traces of its old habits even in its modern degraded 

 form. 



We have in England another common weed, very 

 like the salad-burnet, and popularly known as stanch- 

 wound, or great-burnct, whose history is quite as 

 interesting as that of its neighbour. The stanch- 

 wound is really a salad-burnet which has again lost 

 its habit of depending upon the wind for fertilisation, 

 and has reverted to the earlier insect-attracting tactics 

 of the race. As it had already lost its petals, how- 



