Their leaves were smaller and stiffer than ever before, but they had a great many of them, and their flowers were large and white. They grew to like the sandy soil, and what they got from it changed their sap in some way so their petals were delicately tinged with pink. The bees liked these pink flowers; perhaps their honey was a little richer; perhaps they could see them better. However that may be, the bees almost deserted the white-blossomed plants and visited the pink ones. So the white flowers set few seeds and the pink flowers many. When the seeds sprouted, the pink ones were the strongest, because in their change of color there was somehow added a change in strength; they were stronger than the white flowers. They grew fast and took the materials from the earth and the air; and when the white flowers saw this, they said, “It is their turn now,” so they changed into gases and minerals and other things and helped the pink flowers to grow. Soon there were no more white flowers to be seen; they had stopped growing, and only the pink ones kept on, so we shall have to call these pink flowers Quintus. But a great danger threatened Quintus. Cows and goats and sheep bit off their leaves. They ate so much of them that many plants were killed outright. Only the stiffest and hardest were left to blossom and set seed. The seeds of these plants with the stiff leaves and stems grew into other stiff-stemmed and stiff-leaved plants. The cattle browsed the tenderest of these and again left the stiffest. This went on for many years, the plants growing stiffer and harder each year. Some of them got so stiff and hard that they threw out prickles all over their stems. These prickly ones were not eaten, and in time you would have found them grown into woody bushes with prickly stems. We shall have to call these Sextus. Sextus spread all over the sandy plains. Hardly any other plant was to be seen. The strong Sextus seeds sprouted and took the materials in the earth and the air, and the other seeds that happened to be blown among them did not grow; they changed into gases and minerals and other substances and helped the Sextus plants to grow. One day some Sextus seeds blew upon good, rich, damp soil, and there they sprouted and grew. They had plenty of water, and there were no cattle to disturb them; so those with the fewest prickles were the best off, because they could use the food material to make larger flowers instead of prickles. So the plants with fewer prickles had larger flowers and better seeds, and these seeds sprouted and grew, and the others gave way before them. In the course of time these plants growing on the rich soil lost their prickles, and their flowers were large and very deep pink; in fact, some of them were a bright red. These bright red flowers attracted the bees, and so they lived on and set seed. These we must call Septimus. For some reason some of the seeds of the Septimus flowers developed unusually thrifty plants.