62 LEAFLETS. 



disunited bulge out, as it were to admit air and insects to the 

 generative organs, so that this part of the corolla is inflated and 

 described as fenesbrate, or with window-like openings. Of 

 course if this tension of the lower and free portion of the segments 

 may be supposed in some ancestral type — and it easily may — to 

 have caused a rupture of this tube by the upper suture, in such a 

 case, the tension which held separate the fenestrated parts 

 being relieved, the complete union of the segments throughout 

 would easily have followed, and the ligule of the Cichoriacese 

 would have come into existence by a process of development 

 exactly the reverse of that of the splitting down from the top 

 of a corolla that was already united and tubular from the base 

 to above the middle. 



In Europe where exist not only such suggestive, if not instruct- 

 ive types as Jasione, Phyteuma, and some others ; where from 

 immemorial time, and long before the rise of botany, people 

 detected likeness in aspect and likeness in quality to the extent 

 of using as salads having the same taste, both cichoriaceous and 

 campanulaceous plants; in Europe, I say, it is not strange that 

 really afBnity was conceded by the most noted systematists to 

 subsist between these two groups of plants, a good while before 

 the close of the eighteenth century. And it was this fact which 

 with every noted botanist of the nineteenth century, prevented 

 the placing, in books, of the whole rank and file of the " Com- 

 positsB proper " in between the cichoricese and their next of kin. 

 But this movement, which is either blindly or else stubbornly 

 retrogressive — surely retrogressive — which interposes nearly or 

 quite a thousand genera, and probably twenty thousand species 

 between groups of plants as closely related, at least, as are the Cru- 

 ciferese and the Capparidese, or the Ranunculaceae and the Papa- 

 veracese — this has been undertaken by men whom our reviewer 

 looks up to as promulgators of a " Modern and very philoso- 

 phic system of plant arrangement." The author of such a 

 phrase does not, I think, in this instance know well his topic. 

 His "modern and very philosophic German system of plant 

 arrangement " surely is not modern ; and that it is philosophic, 

 they who know much about the plant world by long experience 



