which no lower animal is capable. We have gone on increasing and widening our love for colour-we have employed it first for personal decoration, in flowers, feathers,” gems, and pigment; then for the decoration of our houses and belongings; then for painting proper and true art. Thus at last the mere beauty of colour by itself, apart from other emotional associations, has become far more potent with us, and especially with civilised man, than with our early progenitors or with our four-handed cousins. We can admire sunsets and sunrises at which they would gaze in stolid indifference. We can admire autumn hues, and distant hills, and countless effects of cloud or light on sea and sky and landscape. And to all these we add a thousand higher elements of the sense of beauty. We feel at once that the speedwell has symmetry of a beautiful sort, which we have learned to appreciate more than any other creatures in the slow growth of human products, from the stone hatchet to Brussels

lace and Henri II. pottery, from the circular hut to Salisbury and Chartres. We feel, also, the beauty of its home associations, of its connected legendary lore, of its old English name, of its domestic familiarity. We feel the reflection upon it of much poetical fancy and dainty conceit. All these things go to make up our sense of beauty when we look at a speedwell, just as much as the blue colour and the primitive instinct of our semihuman progenitors. Do not let us shut our eyes, like Mr. Ruskin, to the elementary facts disclosed by biology; but do not let us, on the other hand, try to resolve our whole complex nature into quadrumanous elements. Man is none the less man because we believe that his very remote ancestor was a sort of distant cousin to the gorilla. We to-day are none the more gorillas for all that.

91

X.

GUELDER ROSE.

COMING out here into the alder copse this bright breezy summer evening, in search of the sweet-scented butterfly orchids which grow so abundantly in the marshy spots beside the bourne, I have not only gathered a thick handful of those quaint green-tipped spiky flowers themselves, but have also lighted unexpectedly upon the first full-blown guelder rose of the season. The bush hangs out of the hedge which severs the copse from the Four Acre; and my eye was attracted a hundred yards off by the great bunches of snow-white blossom, drooping in massive trusses from the long sprays that outgrow the

shorter and stiffer branches of the over-blown hawthorns. Guelder roses are by no means rare flowers, yet I always like to pick a piece or two, because of the curious peculiaritywhich causes them to be cultivated so much in our shrubberies. Not that this real woodland bush-flower has any close resemblance to the round balls of distorted blossoms that our gardeners and florists have been at so much pains to produce for the delectation of tasteless patrons. In this its native state the guelder rose has a bunch of small white, or rather cream-coloured flowers, for the most part a good deal like those of the elder; and, indeed, the very name is said to be a mere philological blunder for elder-rose, and to have no real connection with Guelderland in any way. Still more closely do the little cream-coloured flowers resemble the blossoms of the wayfaring-tree, a member of the same genus, whose mealy leaves and little blue-black berries are familiar objects towards the close of autumn in every tangled overgrown hedge

row. The guelder rose differs, however, from the wayfaring-tree in one conspicuous particular. It has a row of large snow-white flowers on the outside of each bunch, at least twenty times as big as the central ones. They look almost as if they were the blossoms of some other and larger plant, deftly arranged or pinned by some mischievous boy around a bunch of elder blossom, so as to hoax the unwary botanist with a cunning deception. But they are real component elements of the flower-head for all that; and it is these self-same odd, overgrown outer flowers which make the guelder rose so interesting a plant in the eyes of the evolutionary biologist.

Looking close at the small central florets one can see at a glance that each has a little tubular corolla of five united petals, with stamens and pistil in the centre, enclosing the germ of a future berry. But the big expanded outer blossoms are built on quite a different plan. They consist entirely of a large