The Daisy^s Pedigree. 1 7 



in the western parts of Cornwall or the Isle of Skye 

 — who do not know the real nature of flowers ; and 

 these persons must not be wholly contemned because 

 they happen not to be so wise as we ourselves and the 

 Saturday Review. An eminent statistician calculates 

 that Mr. Freeman has demolished the truculent 

 Anglo-Saxon in 970 several passages, and yet there 

 are even now persons who go on firmly believing in 

 that mythical being's historical existence. And the 

 moral of that is this, as the Duchess would say, 

 that you should never blame any one for telling you 

 something that you knew before ; for it is better that 

 ninety-nine wise men should be bored with a twice- 

 told tale, than that one innocent person should be left 

 in mortal error for lack of a short and not Wholly 

 unnecessary elementary explanation. 



The simplest and "earliest blossoms, then — to 

 return from this didactic digression — were very small 

 and inconspicuous flowers, consisting, probably, of a 

 single stamen and a single pistil each. Of these 

 simplest and earliest forms a few still luckily survive 

 at the present day ; for it is one of the rare happy 

 chances in this queerly ordered universe of ours that 

 evolution has almost always left all its footmarks 

 behind it, visibly imprinted upon the earth through 

 all its ages. When any one form develops slowly 

 2 



