I2p Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



extent usurped all the best and most profitable situa- 

 tions in nature. Among them were the immediate 

 ancestors of the goose-grass, which had then regular 

 long tubular blossoms, instead of having a mere flat, 

 disk-shaped corolla like the one you see in the goose- 

 grass before you. But, for a reason which I will pre- 

 sently tell you, in the goose-grass tribe itself the tube 

 has gradually become shorter and shorter again,; till 

 at last there is nothing left of it at all, and the corplla 

 consists simply of four spreading lobes slightly joined 

 together by a little rim or margin at the base. 



How do we know, you ask, that the goose-grass is 

 descended from such ancestral flowers having a long 

 hollow tube ? Why may it not be an early form of 

 tubular blossom, a plant which is just acquiring such 

 a type of flower, rather than one which has once pos- 

 sessed it and afterwards lost it .^ Well, my dear sir, 

 your objection is natural ; but we know it for this 

 reason. I told> you some time since that the other 

 great branch of the madder family, which had stipules 

 instead of whorled leaves, was thereby shown to be a 

 more primitive form of the common type than the 

 stellate tribe, in which these stipules have developed 

 into full-grown leaves. Now, all these tropical 

 madderlike plants have large tubular blossoms, per- 

 fectly developed ; so that we may rieasonably infer 



