THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 
147 
find a pigeon-hole for every plant on the face of the earth ; and if 
plants closely related get into pigeon-holes far apart it cannot be 
helped, and at all events we know where to find them whenever 
they are needed for a better arrangement. 
Now this better arrangement the Natural system purposes to 
effect by grouping plants in orders, families, classes and so forth, 
according to their obvious affinities, so far as those affinities can be 
understood. Thus, to begin with, it is a sensible procedure to 
group all the buttercups in one order, and, as above remarked, in all 
the now-accepted natural systems, the Ranunculacece , the buttercup 
or crowfoot tribe, constitute the first order, and the ODe which there- 
fore demands the first attention of the student. In this order we 
find the buttercups, the clematises, the anemones, the adonis, the 
globe flowers, the hellebores, the columbines, the larkspurs, the 
aconites, the pteonies, and a few other less important tribes. They 
BACK VIEW OF BLOSSOM OF COMMON BUTTEBCCP. 
( Ranunculus repens ), 
o, petal; l, flower-cup, in five sections; c, peduncle. 
are grouped under Ranunculacece because of certain properties 
which they have in common. Thus the flower of any one of them 
has usually a calyx of five or six sepals ; a corolla of five or six 
petals ; many stamens inserted on the receptacle ; many ovaries ; 
watery (as distinct from milky) juice; acrid and poisonous proper- 
ties. You may judge by these few particulars that in the study of 
the natural system every separate fact becomes in its turn a key, a 
royal road, a finger-post, or a magnetic telegraph to some other fact, 
or perhaps to a bigger bundle of tacts than the memory can catch 
hold of at a first effort, though they may be most clearly brought 
before it by the aid of principles that appear to be irrefragable. 
AVe must not, however, consider it a fault of the natural system 
that it offers us at every intellectual meal more than we can hope to 
digest, because we might apply that principle to material things, 
and blame the butcher if he ever sent a joint in which there was an 
ounce of meat more than could be eaten at one sitting. 
We have many more species of crowfoots than the beginner in 
botany would imagine. Tue most plentiful of all is the Creeping 
May. 
