BOTANICAL EVOLUTION, 365 
the fruit, and then five brightly coloured petals. In the Fuchsia 
there are no bracts, but the sepals have cohered to form a tube, 
which being more or less brightly coloured, has to a great extent 
acquired the functions of the petals, and accordingly, we find these 
latter organs greatly reduced in size; in fact, in one species, being 
absent altogether. Then in our Clematis we have a brilliant flower, 
in which the sepals have become very conspicuous and attractive, and 
the petals are wanting altogether. If we examine a garden Anemone, 
we find the same structure, namely, the sepals very brilliantly 
coloured on the inner side, and the petals wanting. But in this case, 
the sepals having assumed the function of a different set of organs, 
their own proper function of protection is taken by the bracts, which 
here have attained a great development. 
This limited power of development, or principle of compensation, 
as I have termed it, is not, however, confined to leaves and flowers; 
it applies to every part of the plant. A very common-place looking 
plant, with yellow cruciferous flowers, which grows wild on maritime 
cliffs in England, is the parent plant of all our cabbages. Two 
varieties, the brocoli and the cauliflower, produce their flower-buds in 
most abnormal clusters, and this peculiarity has been greatly 
intensified by cultivation; two or three more, such as the cabbage, 
savoy, curled greens, &c., produce their leaves in a remarkably 
crowded mass; while lastly, the Brussels sprout is remarkable for 
the great development of its short axillary branches. Ali these 
varieties belong to one and the same species. If their seeds are sown 
in the open ground they all quickly revert (in a few generations) to a 
form almost identical with the wild plant of the English cliffs; we see 
this in the so-called Maori cabbage, so common near Native settle- 
ments, and which has descended from the plants which sprang from 
the seed given to the Natives by Captain Cook. It would be very 
unreasonable, however, to expect one and the same plant to develope 
in all three directions at once, and, as a matter of fact, it never 
does so. 
Asin the case of the animals previously referred to, we might 
multiply examples indefinitely, but those cited will serve to illustrate 
- the principle. 
3. The third fact to which I wish to draw your attention is, the 
enormous production of life on the globe, far in excess of the amount 
which can possibly survive to reach maturity, and its consequent 
results. It is manifest at the first glance that far more animals and 
plants are annually produced than can survive, and that at the 
moment of their coming into existence they enter upon a strugele for 
bare existence. The great law of nature is not “live and let live,” 
but “ kill, kill, kill,” and when the Poet sings as if all nature were at 
peace, and man alone disturbed that peace, the prosaic man of science 
knows that he is indulging only in a little poetic fiction. Whatever 
cravings we may have in our moral and spiritual natures for a 
Paradise where all shall be at peace, where “ the wolf shall dwell with 
the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf 
and the young lion and the fatling together,” yet when we look on the 
world around us as it exists to-day, and has existed since life first 
appeared on it, we see that there never has been nor is there yet any 
peace. Darwin, to whom I believe we owe this phrase “ struggle for 
existence,” says:—‘‘there is no exception to the rule that every 
