I02 Flowers and their Peaigrecs. 



fruit all tell us some curious incident in its past evolu- 

 tion, and are full of suggestiveness as to the general 

 course of plant development. Here is our weed in 

 abundance, growing all along the hedgerow by our 

 side, and clambering for yards from its root over all 

 the bushes and shrubs in the thicket. Pick a piece 

 for yourself before I begin, and then you can follow 

 my preaching at your leisure, with the text always 

 open before you for reference and verification. 



Of course goose-grass had not always all its pre- 

 sent marked peculiarities. Like every other living 

 thing, it has acquired its existing shape by slow 

 modification from a thousand widely different ances- 

 tral forms. One of the best ways to discover certain 

 lost links in the pedigree of plants or animals is to 

 watch the development of an individual specimen 

 from the seed or the egg ; for the individual, we have 

 all often been told, to some extent recapitulates in itself 

 the whole past history of its race. Thus the cater- 

 pillar shows us an early ancestral form of the butter- 

 fly, while it was still a wingless grub ; and the tadpole 

 shows us an early ancestral form of the frog, while it was 

 still a limbless mud fish. So, too, the chick hatching 

 within the shell goes through stages analogous to 

 those of the fish, the amphibian, the reptile, and the 

 bird successively. In just the same way young plants 



