A Family History. 235 



to fairly well-known plants, whose peculiarities we can 

 all carry easily in our mind's eye, rather than to over- 

 load the question with technical details about un-' 

 known or unfamiliar species, whose names convey no 

 notion at all to an English reader. When we con- 

 sider, too, that the roses form only one family out of 

 the ninety families of flowering plants to be found in 

 England alone, it will be clear that such a genealogy 

 as that which I have here endeavoured roughly to 

 sketch out is but one among many interesting plant 

 pedigrees which might be easily constructed on evolu- 

 tionary principles. Indeed, the roses are a compara- 

 tively small group by the side of many others, such 

 as the pea-flowers, the carrot tribe, and the dead- 

 nettles. Thus, we have in England only forty-five 

 species of roses, as against over two hundred species 

 of the daisy family. Nevertheless, I have chosen the 

 rose tribe as the best example of a genealogical study 

 of plants, because most probably a larger number of 

 roses are known to unbotanical readers than is the 

 case with any other similar division of the vegetable 

 world. 



