tail-fin, and its eyeballs, without sockets, are on the outside of its head. All of our common barnyard fowls—turkeys, ducks, geese, and chickens—are flightless, but the varieties from which the domesticated forms have come all have functional wings, two of these varieties crossing continents in their annual migrations. Not only animals, but plants also, many of them, have been greatly changed by man in his efforts to adapt them to his uses as food, ornamentation, and the like. On the seaside cliffs of Chili and Peru may still be found growing the wild-potato—the small, tough, bitter ancestor of the mammoth Burbank, Peerless, Early Rose, and the nearly two hundred other varieties of this matchless tuber found in the gardens of civilised man. The cabbage, kale, cauliflower, and kohlrabi are all modifications of the same wild species (_Brassica oleracea_), the cauliflower being the developed flower, kohlrabi the stalk, and kale and cabbage the leaves. The peach and the almond, Darwin thinks, have also come from a common ancestral drupe, the peach being the developed fruit, and the almond the seed. There are nearly 900 different varieties of apples, varying in the most wonderful manner in size, colour, flavour, texture, and shape, but all of them probably derived from the little, sour, inedible Asiatic crab. The many times ‘double’ roses of our gardens have come from the five-petalled wild-rose of the prairies. The cultivated varieties of viburnum and hydrangea have showy corymbs of infertile flowers only, but the wild forms from which the domestic varieties have been derived have only a single marginal row of showy infertile flowers surrounding a mass of inconspicuous fertile flowers. It has been due to their efforts to please men that bananas, pineapples, and oranges have got into the habit of neglecting to produce seeds. There are certain species of grapes that are seedless, also seedless sugar-cane, and a seedless apple has just been announced by horticulturists. The development of domesticated plants is only in its infancy, and it is probably impossible even for the most agile imagination to dream of the miracles the horticulturist is destined to work in the ages to come. There is every reason to believe that seedless varieties of all our common fruits will ultimately be produced, and that in size, flavour, nutrient constituents, and appearance, they will be developed into forms utterly different from existing varieties. Just within the last few years the U.S. Department of Agriculture has developed a cotton-plant immune to the bacterial diseases of the soil, which had completely driven the cotton-raising industry out of large districts of the South. The cultivation of many of the cereals has gone on so long, and has proceeded so far, that their origin is lost in antiquity.