Ii6 Flowers and their Pedigrees 



alone. Such an obvious improvement gives it an 

 undoubted advantage in the struggle for life, and so 

 in its own special positions it has fairly beaten all the 

 other galiums out of the field. One of its common 

 English names — Robin Run-the-hedge^sufficiently 

 expresses the exact place in nature which it has thus 

 adapted itself to fill and to adorn. 



But how did the goose-grass first develop these 

 little prickles .' That is the question. Granting that 

 their possession would give it an extra chance in the 

 struggle for existence, if once they were to occur, 

 how are we to account for their first beginning ? In 

 this way, as it seems to me. Viewed structurally, the 

 stout little hooks which arm the stem and leaves are 

 only thickened hairs. Now hairs, or long pointed 

 projections from the epidermis, constantly occur in 

 almost all plants, and in this very family they are 

 found on the edges of the leaflets and on the angles 

 of the sten? among several allied species. But such 

 hairs may easily happen to grow a little thicker or 

 harder, by mere individual or constitutional variation ; 

 and in a plant with habits like the goose-grass 

 every increase in thickness and hardness would prove 

 beneficial, by helping the festoons to creep over the 

 bushes among which they live. Thus generation after 

 generation those incipient goose-grasses which best 



