The little streamlet whose tiny ranges and stickles form the middle thread of this green combe in the Dorset downs is just at present richly clad with varied foliage. Tall spikes of the yellow flag rise above the slow-flowing pools, while purple loose-strife overhangs the bank, and bunches of the arrowhead stand high out of their watery home, just unfolding their pretty waxen white flowers to the air. In the rapids, on the other hand, I find the curious water crowfoot, a spray of which I have this moment pulled out of the stream and am now holding in my hand as I sit on the little stone bridge, with my legs dangling over the pool below, known to me as the undoubted residence of a pair of trout. It is a queer plant, this crowfoot, with its two distinct types of leaves, much cleft below and broad above; and I often wonder why so strange a phenomenon has attracted such very scant attention. But then we knew so little of life in any form till the day before yesterday that perhaps it is not surprising we should still have left so many odd problems quite untouched. This problem of the shape of leaves certainly seems to me a most important one; and yet it has hardly been even recognised by our scientific pastors and masters. At best, Mr. Herbert Spencer devotes to it a passing short chapter, or Mr. Darwin a stray sentence. The practice of classifying plants mainly by means of their flowers has given the flower a wholly factitious and overwrought importance. Besides, flowers are so pretty, and we cultivate them so largely, with little regard to the leaves, that they have come to usurp almost the entire interest of botanists and horticulturists alike. Darwinism itself has only heightened this exclusive interest by calling attention to the reciprocal relations which exist between the honey-bearing blossom and the fertilising insect, the bright-coloured petals and the myriad facets of the butterfly's eye. Yet the leaf is after all the real plant, and the flower is but a sort of afterthought, an embryo colony set apart for the propagation of like plants in future. Each leaf is in truth a separate individual organism, united with many others into a compound community, but possessing in full its own mouths and digestive organs, and carrying on its own life to a great extent independently of the rest. It may die without detriment to them; it may be lopped off with a few others as a cutting, and it continues its life-cycle quite unconcerned. An oak tree in full foliage is a magnificent group of such separate individuals--a whole nation in miniature: it may be compared to a branched coral polypedom covered with a thousand little insect workers, while each leaf answers rather to the separate polypes themselves. The leaves are even capable of producing new individuals by what they contribute to the buds on every branch; and the seeds which the tree as a whole produces are to be looked upon rather as the founders of fresh colonies, like the swarms