HIGHNESS AND LOWNESS IN PLANTS 445 
sexual organs and their accessories that all the Nat. Orders 
are defined. The organs of locomotion afford the Botanist 
no characters, those of digestion next to none : and the 
mode after which the various component parts of a com- 
pound body (a plant) are arranged is valuable only for the 
3 highest groups, Monocot, Dicot, and Acot, and not absolute 
even amongst these. Generally speaking, in Botany highness 
and lowness are synonymous with complexity and simphcity 
of structure. I can hardly conceive either simphcity or 
complexity of one particular organ indicating the rank of 
a being in the scale of creation. 
November J.851. 
Cofrosma is almost pecuhar to N. Zealand, and for the 
Ufe of me I do not know how to draw the Hne between there 
being only one species or 28 !— it covers the country in 
every form of herb, bush and tree, from sea to mountain 
top,— but it is no worse than Kubus, Willow or Kosa are 
in Gt. Britain, and on the whole I ignore Bory's theory .i 
Generally speaking, the N. Zealand species are as well or 
better marked than the European, or the Australian, where 
Eucalyptus and various other genera are not to be surpassed 
in Protean dispositions. For the rest, recent discoveries 
rather tend to ally the N. Zeald. Flora with the Australian 
—though there is enough affinity with extratropical S. 
America to be very remarkable and far more than can be 
accounted for by any known laws of migration. I am 
becoming slowly more convinced of the probabihty of the 
Southern Flora being a fragmentary one— all that remains 
of a great Southern continent. A second species of the 
otherwise strictly great S. American genus Calceolaria has 
turned up in N. Zealand, and of the two only genera of N. 
Zeald. Leguminosae, one, a tree (Edwardsia), is common to 
Chih and N. Zealand and to no other countries— the other 
is confined to N.Z. and alhed to nothing. Several of the 
truly wild grasses are European I think, and yet not found 
in Australia ! 
Hitcham: June 1854. 
Will you oblige me with your ideas of what constitutes 
highness and lowness in the Animal Kingdom ? e.g. in 
1 See p. 439. 
