CCXIX. — THE SPRING GENTIAN. 
Gentiana verna Linne. 
A MONG the fancy portraits on the title-page of Dodoens’s Herbal, to which 
L we have before alluded, is one of a certain Gentius, last King of Illyria, 
who is stated by Pliny to have first discovered the medicinal virtue of the plant 
named after him, and who was conquered by Rome in 1 6 8 b.c. Like many other 
such royal remedies, Gentian owed much ot its early repute to its alleged value as 
an antidote to poison. 
The genus Gentiana is by far the largest in the Family to which it gives its 
name, comprising in all some three hundred species, ot which less than forty are 
European and only five or six are British. The great majority are alpine plants, 
with the perennial tufted habit and relatively large and brilliantly-coloured flowers 
characteristic of that biological group. Some species ascend to an altitude of i6,coo 
feet in the Himalaya, and the majority belong to the mountains of the Northern 
Hemisphere. They are, however, represented in the Andes — to which region the 
red-flowered species are mainly confined — in Australia, and in New Zealand. All of 
them are herbaceous plants with opposite, sessile, and often strongly- ribbed leaves, 
both stem and leaves being usually glabrous. Their flowers are either solitary and 
terminal, or in erect, somewhat rigid dichasial or trichasial, cymes, and are usually 
pentamerous, though occasionally tetramerous. The calyx is valvate, and the funnel- 
shaped or salver-shaped corolla sometimes has pleated folds between its lobes, and 
the tube lined with hairs or furnished with scales. The epipetalous stamens are 
included and the single style is surmounted by a bilobed, persistent stigma. The fruit 
is a septicidally two-valved, one-chambered capsule, with numerous seeds. Although 
mostly of a lovely blue, the flowers of the genus comprise yellow, white, pink, and 
red forms. In colour, length, and width of corolla-tube and other structural 
characters the species form ascending series, adapted to lower and higher types 
of insect pollen-bearers. Grant Allen used such series to illustrate the principle 
laid down by Alfred Russel Wallace that colour is most apt to appear or to vary 
in those parts of plants or animals which have undergone the highest amount of 
modification. 
11 In this way,” he writes, u we may put it down as a general rule that the least developed flowers are usually yellow or 
white ; those which have undergone a little more modification are usually pink or red ; and those which have been most 
highly specialised of any are usually purple, lilac, or blue. Absolute deep ultramarine probably marks the highest level of all. 
“On the other hand, Mr. Wallace’s principle also explains why the bees and butterflies should prefer these specialised 
colours to all others, and should therefore select the flowers which display them by preference over any less devcl ped types. 
For. bees and butterflies are the most highly adapted of all insects to honey-seeking and flower-feeding . . . And if the more 
specialised and modified flowers, which gradually fitted their forms and the positions of their honey-glands to the forms of the 
bees or butterflies, showed a natural tendency to pass from yellow through pink and red to purple and blue, it would follow 
that the insects which were being evolved side by side with them, and which were aiding at the same time in their evolution, 
would grow to recognise their developed colours as the visible symbols of those flowers from which they could obtain the 
largest amount of hunger with the least possible trouble. Thus it would finally result that the ordinary unspecialised flowers, 
which depended upon small insect riff-raff, would be mostly left yellow or white ; those which appealed to rather higher insects 
would become pink or red ; and those which laid themselves out for bees and butterflies, the aristocrats of the arthropodous 
world, would grow for the most part to be purple or blue.” 
