ON THE DIRECTIVITY OF LIFE. 



263 



was taught at Cirencester that, although common land buttercups 

 love wet meadows, you may get rid of them completely by laying a 

 whole meadow under water for a month or so — the time for which 

 water meadows are flooded twice a year — yet in all our floodings, 

 artificial and natural, no one ever knew a land buttercup turn into a 

 water one. 



That the splitting up of a leaf through peculiar environment does 

 not readily tend to become a permanent character is evidenced by 

 the case of the horse radish, for in the centre of a clump of horse- 

 radishes you will sometimes find a good number of leaves resembling 

 the frond of a simple fern with a separate segment to each principal 

 vein. Yet, whoever saw a species of horse radish that had such 

 leaves instead of the usual entire leaves 



But, in any case, nothing in this paper proves that the essential organs 

 of a plant, left to natural influences alone, ever materially change. 



Certain species of heath in South Africa and of epacris in 

 Australia greatly resemble each other in foliages, as the Professor 

 has shown us, and because, as he maintains, of the similar dry 

 climate ; but still the Australian plants all keep the five petals of 

 their order, and the African ones their four. 



An article written by Mr. Sutton for the Gardeners' Chronicle, after 

 a recent tour in Palestine, upon the behaviour of the two well- 

 known plants. Anemone coronaria and Ranunculus asiaticus, is strong 

 evidence against evolution. They have flowers alike in shape and 

 size, and often in colour also. But the anemone has, of course, only 

 one floral envelope — no outer cup like the ranunculus, its leaves 

 are much more finely cut than its rival's, and it begins to bloom 

 three weeks earlier. They grow together at all altitudes, from the 

 shore of the lake of Galilee to the top of Carmel, over a range of 

 five thousand feet or more, yet they never interchange or lose one of 

 their three distinctions : the earlier blooming plant is always the 

 one with the single row of bright flower leaves and with the finely 

 divided stem leaves, the later blooming plant has always both 

 calyx and corolla and stem-leaves simply three-parted. 



It was at Cirencester that I first learnt the peculiarity of the 

 primrose in having its stamens in one flower all reaching higher than 

 its style, and in another its style reaching higher than its stamens, 

 and that Darwin^ had discovered that the stigmas of short styles 

 fertilized from high stamens, and of high styles fertilized from short 



