THE WATER CROWFOOT— continued. 
While many terrestrial Ranunculi are hairy, these Batrachian forms, as they are 
termed, are — like most aquatics — glabrous. The flowers — in some forms at least — 
have a slight fragrance and are visited by various small water-frequenting flies. The 
occurrence of semi-transparent white petals with a yellow base in such widely distinct 
aquatic plants as this group and the Monocotyledonous Frog-bit {Hydrocharis Morsus- 
rana Linn6) suggests that, perhaps, these colours are peculiarly attractive to such 
insects. As the flowers are usually protandrous they are, no doubt, generally 
cross-pollinated ; but if the water keeps at so high a level that the blossoms are 
submerged, they remain closed and are self-pollinating. 
Botanists differ widely as to the number of species to be recognised as distinct 
among these Water Crowfoots, all of which were lumped together as Ranunculus 
aquatilis by Linnaeus. It has been suggested that, belonging as they do to a group 
the majority of the species in which are not aquatic, their aquatic habits have been 
only acquired at a comparatively recent date, and that for this reason they are a very 
variable or polymorphic series of forms, readily modifying many of their structural 
characters according to variations in their surroundings. In rapid streams, for 
instance, no floating leaves occur, the long dark olive-green tassels of submerged 
leaves in the waters of the Severn being, it has been plausibly said, the tresses of 
Sabrina in Milton’s “ Comus ” that no summer drought is to scorch, while Tennyson 
also alludes to them as 
“Those long mosses in the stream.” 
While these submerged leaves have earned for these plants, in common with several 
others, the name of Water Milfoil^ the three-lobed floating leaves of some of the 
forms are sufficiently like those of Anemone Hepatica to have suggested that of 
Water Liverwort. Henry Lyte, in his translation of Dodoens’s Herbal (1578), says 
that the apothecaries called the plant Hepatica aquatica and “ very erroneously use it 
for Hepatica.” While it is undoubtedly true, as Sir Joseph Hooker says, that some 
of the characters used to discriminate the forms are variable, and that some of them 
are adaptive, altering with changes in their surroundings, there are others which are 
neither variable nor adaptive ; and every serious student of these “ critical ” groups, 
as they are called, recognises that they include a considerable number of allied but 
distinct types, though lumped under a common name by less careful scrutiny. 
The form represented in our Plate, often covering standing waters with its 
numerous, rather large blossoms, which have their petals not in contact and each 
with nine or more veins, was described by the late Professor Charles Cardale 
Babington in 1855 as Ranunculus floribundus. 
