we would track the question to its very roots, we must go down first to the butterfly and the primrose, before we can understand the true relations of the bird or the mammal to the various fruits which attract them.

In short, we must push back our inquiry to-day to the ultimate origin of colored bodies and of the color-sense. If we look about us in the unsophisticated fields and valleys, we shall find that the ordinary hues of nature are green, brown, and blue. Only a few exceptional objects, like insects, birds, fruits, and flowers, are tinted with the brighter dyes of scarlet, crimson, orange, and yellow. We shall see, on closer inspection, that every one of these organic bodies has been specially developed to meet the wants of animal eyes. We shall find that the flower has been given its brilliant corolla in order to attract the bee and the butterfly; that the fruit has acquired its glowing coat in order to lure on the bird and the mammal; and that the feathers, scales, and gaudy fur of these animate creatures themselves have a special relation to the nature of their food, their habits, and their surroundings. In other words, the beautiful colors of the external world, and the delight which conscious minds feel in their beauty, have both a common origin in the great principles of evolution and natural selection. Let us see what light can be shed upon this intricate question of their interdependence by the magnificent generalisations which science and humanity owe to Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin.

If we wish to get at the very origin of flowers, we must go a long way back in time to the earliest geological age; and we must look at the condition of those vast primæval forests in which terrestrial animal life made with trembling feet its first forward steps. We must imagine ourselves placed as spectators in the midst of a flora totally unlike any now existing on our earth-a flora which we can only picture to ourselves by its incomplete resemblance to a few surviving but antiquated forms. In the great tropical swamps whose refuse supplies the coal for our grates, there grew a thick herbage of ferns and club-mosses and strange green plants, but probably not a single distinguishable flower. It

is true that a fair sprinkling among the vegetable productions of those luxuriant wilds belong to the botanical sub-kingdom of Phanerogams or flowering plants; but these few exceptions are almost all trees or shrubs of the pine and palm kinds, bearing the green cones or catkins which science recognises as inflorescences, but not the conspicuous bunches of colored leaves which ordinary people know as flowers. In the forests which then bordered the great deltas of forgotten Amazons and Niles, it seems probable that no gleam of scarlet, blue, or purple ever broke the interminable sea of waving green. Uncanny trees, with sculptured or tessellated bark, raised their verdant heads high above the damp soil into which they thrust their armorplated roots; huge horsetails swayed their jointed stems before the fiercer tempests raised by a younger and lustier sun; tree-ferns, screw-pines, and araucarias diversified the landscape with their quaint and symmetrical shapes ;* while beneath, the rich decaying mould was carpeted with mosses, lichens, and a thousand creeping plants, all of them bearing the archaic stamp peculiar to these earliest developments of vegetable life: but nowhere could the eye of an imaginary visitor have lighted on a bright flower, a crimson fruit, or a solitary gaudily-painted butterfly. Green, and green, and green again, on every side; the gaze would have rested, wherever it fell, upon one unbroken field of glittering verdure.

To put it simply, all the earliest plants belonged to the flowerless division of the vegetable kingdom; and though a few flowering species made their appearance on earth even before the epoch at which our coal-beds were formed, yet these were of the sort whose pollen is borne by the wind, and whose blossoms are accordingly unprovided with gay colors, or sweet scents, or honeyed secretions, as a bait for the insect visitor to rifle and fertilise their bloom. The greater part of the larger coal flora consisted of acrogens, that is to say, of plants like the ferns, club-mosses, and horsetails, which have spores instead of seeds, and

*These names must only be accepted in a the nearest familiar congener of the extinct representative sense, as giving a modern reader

forms.

so of course bear neither fruit nor flower. The smaller creeping plants belonged to the same class, or to the still more humble thallogens, represented in our world by lichens and seaweeds. Only a few conifers foreshadowed the modern tribes of flowering plants; and even these were of the most abnormal and antiquated type to be found in the whole sub-kingdom.

How, then, did those crimson, orange, or purple leaves which make up the popular idea of a flower first originate? And how did the seed which it is their object to produce, become coated with that soft, sweet, pulpy, and bright-colored envelope which we call in everyday language a fruit? Clearly the first of these questions must be answered before we attack the second, both because the flower precedes the fruit in point of time, and because the tastes formed by the flower have become the raison-d'être of the fruit. I propose, therefore, in the present paper, to attempt some slight solution of the earlier problem; and I hope in a future number of the CORNHILL MAGAZINE to set before my readers some remarks upon the later one.

The origin of flowers is not a difficult subject upon which to hazard a plausible conjecture. Even in the flowerless plants we see occasionally some approach to that separate set of organs for reproductive purposes which reaches its fullest development in the colored and scented blossoms of our gardens. Most ferns, as we all know, bear their spores on the under side of every frond, where some of them form the beautiful powder which gives a name and a charm to the gold and silver ferns. But the splendid Osmunda regalis, besides several smaller species, has its seed vessels on an independent stem, thus exhibiting that division of labor among its parts which allows each more efficiently to perform its own special function. And the horsetails carry this movement one step further in advance, having a distinct fruit-bearing growth early in the spring, which is followed by sterile shoots later on in the year. So that through these faint indications we can picture dimly to ourselves the gradual stream of evolution by which the frondborne spore made its first onward metamorphosis towards the flower-borne seed.

But such fructiferous heads of embryonic acrogens differ widely in the most important particular from true flowers. They do not need fertilisation.* The very essence of the flower consists in the fact that its ovule, or embryo seed, must be quickened into fresh life by the contact of pollen, either from the same or another blossom. All the rest which we ordinarily think of as belonging to the flower-its bright petals, its sweet scent, its store of honey-are merely so many accessories to this central fact. The true flower begins at the point where pollen and ovules first make their appearance. And in the earliest geological flowering plants, the pollen was apparently wafted to the ovule on the wings of the wind, not on the heads or bodies of insects. They belonged to that coniferous family in which the seeds are borne on a scaly head, such as we know so familiarly in the pine and the fir-tree: so that their green scales could have formed no exception to the prevailing verdure of a palæozoic forest.

"But what advantage did the plant gain from this complicated arrangement of seed-producing organs?" A not unnatural question to ask, yet a very difficult one to answer. So far, only a speculative explanation of the facts has been attempted; and that speculation is too intricate and too fundamental for any but the trained physiologist to appreciate. Happily, however, the facts themselves have been placed beyond all doubt by Mr. Darwin's minute observations on cross fertilisation. Our great master has shown us that when any organism is the product of interaction between the parts of two other organisms, it possesses a vigor, plasticity, and vital power far surpassing that of any similar individual produced by one unaided parent. He has proved incontestably that young plants derived from a self-fertilised flower are weaker, poorer, and shabbier than those derived from the pollen of one flower and the ovule of another. And this general principle, illustrated on the small scale by Mr. Darwin's experi ments, has been demonstrated on a gigantic scale by Nature herself for

* The obscure phenomena connected with the antheridia and pistillidia of cryptogams do not interfere with the practical truth of this statement accepted in a popular sense.

IN the whole brilliant museum which lavish Nature opens so bountifully before the eyes of those who can see-a class unhappily far smaller than it ought to be, but growing from day to day as each neophyte opens in turn the sealed eyes of his neighbors-there is nothing so lovely as the bright and graceful flowers of our meadows, our hedgerows, and our gardens. There is nothing inanimate to which we turn with so tender and so loving a regard; nothing which we so instinctively invest with the attributes and emotions of the human soul. From the merest child and the veriest savage to the truest artist and the deepest philosopher, every heart has ever ready in its depths a thrill of delight in unison with those exquisite gems of God's handiwork. In a previous paper I have endeavored to trace this feeling to its varied sources in the minds of men, and to disentangle the many strands of simple and complex emotion which, when woven together, make up

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVIII., No. 2

our total synthetic pleasure in the contemplation of a wayside posy. But in the analysis which I then undertook, it was necessary to accept the love of color in itself as a given factor, whose origin we were content for the time to leave unexplained. There is reason to think, however, that the pleasure of simple colors, red and orange and yellow, green and violet and purple, which stands out as so distinct an element in our æsthetic nature, may be finally traced back to the remote effects of flowers and fruits upon the animal kingdom generally, and upon primitive man in particular. So far as the human species is concerned, there can be little doubt that our color-sense depends more upon the golden rind of the orange, the crimson cheeks of the cherry, the melting tints of the mango and the peach, the blush of grapes and apples, or the ruddy glow of wayside berries, than upon the thousand beauties of English wild-flowers or the massive wealth of tropical blossoms. But if

9

when once the flowering plants were introduced upon the earth by a favorable combination of surrounding circumstances, their superior vitality enabled them in the struggle for existence to live down their flowerless neighbors, and to spread themselves slowly but surely over the whole habitable globe. While the flora of the coal and the earlier formations consists almost entirely of ferns, club-mosses, and horsetails, the surface. of our existing earth is covered by grasses, herbs, and forest-trees; and only in a few tropical ravines or a stray patch of English warren do we still find the degenerate modern representatives of those Titanic calamites and lycopodites which flourished in the jungles of the Black Country a million æons since.

We can guess, accordingly, how flowers, in the botanical sense, came first to be developed. Where a chance combination of external agencies occurred to carry certain cast-off reproductive cells of one plant to the most exposed cells of another, there may have resulted such a race of hearty descendants, endowed with a similar tendency to produce their like in future, as could compete at an enormous advantage with the sexless and flowerless plants around. Vague and indefinite as our conception of this process must necessarily be, we can still figure to our imagination enough of its nature to find in it no miracle, but a simple physical fact. The next step in our inquiry must be to account for those bright and conspicuous masses of leaves which the 'popular eye recognises as flowers. To do so properly, we must glance first at the few animals and insects which peopled the green paleozoic forests, and whose descendants were to prove the principal agents in developing the blossoms and fruits that we see around us.

Few if any birds or mammals lived amongst those rank jungles of more than tropical growth. Reptiles of serpentine or lizard-like form crawled through their dense underbrush of club-moss and lichens; while primitive scorpions, beetles, and cockroaches eked out a hard-earned livelihood by devouring smaller prey, or by feeding on the more succulent parts of the dry and horny plants around them; but not a single moth or butterfly flitted among the primeval tree-ferns

and pines, as they flit in countless myriads now on the banks of the Amazon or the mountain slopes of Ceylon and Jamaica.* The higher and brighter forms of insect life are entirely dependent upon the honey or other secretions of flowers, and without flowers they could not continue to exist for a day, much less come for the first time into existence.

As soon, however, as any floweringplants at all began to show themselves on the face of the earth, if only in the form of cones or green panicles, we may be sure that they were visited for the purpose of feeding by some of the smaller insects of those days. The pollen and other parts of the incipient blossom would almost certainly attract attention both by their softness and their nutritious properties. We shall see hereafter, when we come to examine the case of fruits, that those very portions of plants which are devoted to the growth of their offspring are the exact portions best fitted for animals to devour and thrive upon. And as the insects would carry away small quantities of the pollen, adhering to their legs and heads, they would be very likely to deposit some part of it on the stickier portion of similar blossoms which they afterwards visited. Any flower that offered exceptional advantages to such visitors in the way of food, would thus be able to substitute the new mode of fertilisation by means of insects, for the old one by means of the wind. Moreover, this substitution would prove economical to the plant, because wind-fertilised flowers require a large number of stamens and pistils, hanging out in conspicuous situations, so that the pollen may be borne away upon the breeze in sufficient quantities to fertilise a large proportion of the neighboring blossoms. Of course such

*Those readers who have personally made acquaintance with tropical scenery will be able to recognise in the picture of green forests given above a strong family likeness to the existing vegetation in the warmer zones of our earth. It is a great mistake to suppose that the tropics are noticeable for their brilliant coloring. Here and there, under exceptional circumstances, one may light upon a solitary tree covered by huge scarlet or yellow flowers, of a kind which we seldom see in temperate climates; but the general aspect of a tropical hillside is that of monotonous and wearisome verdure.