MIMICRY IN PLANTS. 
7 
by the samara in four genera, belonging to three distinct natural 
orders, all large shrubs or trees, natives of Brazil. A single 
genus of Polygalacese, the Securidaca , chiefly inhabitants of 
Tropical South America, but extending also into Africa and 
India, is distinguished by its remarkable winged fruit, varying 
somewhat in different species, one of the commonest of which is 
represented by Fig. 4. In Figs. 5 and 6 are delineated the similar 
samaroid fruits of two species belonging to different genera of 
the order Phytolaccacese, and having therefore no genetic affinity 
whatever with the first. Fig. 7 again is an example of the 
fruit of a Heteropterys , a genus of Malpighiacese, comprising 
a large number of species, also mostly Tropical American, with 
a few representatives in Africa. This order is again equally 
dissociated from both the preceding ones. It will be remarked 
that not only the form of the wing, but its very texture and 
the arrangement of the veins, are reproduced most accurately 
in all the species, a dissection of the fruit alone showing their 
essential difference in structure. So close indeed and deceptive 
is this resemblance when the plant is not in flower, that the 
very specimen of the Seguiera from which our drawing is 
taken, in the Berlin Herbarium, is labelled by so experienced a 
botanist as Klotzsch as Securidaca ; and Walpers, in his “Be- 
pertorium,” has erroneously described five species of Seguiera 
as Securidacas. Everyone, indeed, familiar with herbaria, will 
know of similar instances. It should be noted also that the sama- 
roid fruit is not characteristic of any one of these three natural 
orders, but only of certain tribes or of single genera. When 
attention is directed to the subject, a careful search would 
doubtless be rewarded by the detection of a large number of 
instances of similar resemblance or mimetic analogy in the 
vegetable kingdom, as remarkable, or even more so, than those 
we have here instanced. 
Having now chronicled a few of the facts of this curious and 
interesting subject, I shall be expected at least to attempt 
some explanation, or to start some theory respecting them. 
And here our real difficulty commences. Even to arrive at 
the recognition of any one law running through these pheno- 
mena seems, in the present state of our knowledge, impossible. 
In the first place I shall be found fault with for using the 
term u Mimicry ” in reference to the subject at all. But I 
must confess to being unable to see the force of the objection, 
and must continue to consider the series of facts as observed in 
the animal and vegetable kingdoms as essentially parallel. 
Strictly speaking, on etymological grounds, the term is open 
to some objection; /Averts , w an imitation ; a representation 
by art,” implies doubtless a conscious intentional mimicry, 
which we can no more believe in, in the case of butterflies, than of 
