( 98 ) 
[February, 
ANALYSES OF BOOKS. 
Colin Clout's Calendar. The Record of a Summer — April to 
October. By Grant Allen. London : Chatto and Windus. 
We have here another of those bright, chatty volumes in which 
Mr. Allen is rendering the New Natural History into the language 
of daily life, and incorporating it with the stock notions of the 
public. This is a much-needed task, and the author takes it in 
hand not merely with a thorough good-will, but with a rare 
felicity. 
The first interesting observation we find refers to the difference 
of ground selected by each of those closely kindred flowers the 
primrose and the cowslip. Both of course love a chalky or calca- 
reous soil, and are scant and poor where lime is deficient. But 
the primrose, Mr. Allen tells us, grows chiefly on sloping banks 
and the sides of little hillocks, whilst the cowslip is found in 
abundance in the midst of level plains. This distinction is noted 
in an old song which we heard some thirty years ago, — the fossil 
fragment, so to speak, of an opera which has been duly consigned 
to extinction for the twofold sin of English music and English 
words : — 
“ Primroses deck the bank’s green side, 
Cowslips adorn the valley.” 
This simple fact will give us a good illustration of the difference 
between the two Schools of Natural History. The Old School 
would have simply noted it as a fact. The New, or Evolutionist 
School, brings the fact into connection with certain features in the 
growth of the two plants. The cowslip carries its flowers in a 
cluster at the summit of a stout stalk, high enough to overtop the 
grass at that early season of the year when it usually comes into 
bloom. The primrose has its flowers singly, each supported on a 
stalk too short and slender to bear them up above the neighbouring 
herbage. Hence were they to grow in the same localities the 
primrose would be likely to escape observation, whilst the cowslip 
would be seen very well. Thus the primrose haunts sloping 
grounds where the shortness of its stalk does not occasion con- 
cealment. Hence the difference of ground is not an arbitrary 
matter, but is in connection with the structural features of the two 
plants. 
But a botanist of the first quarter of the century might and 
would still ask, What would the primrose suffer if it escaped ob- 
servation ? If this were the case it would not be visited by bees 
and butterflies, and would consequently lose all the benefits of 
