change and progress, in humans as well as plants. Browne writes that the poem may be seen as "an early study in what was to be Darwin's lifelong commitment to the idea of transmutation.” Darwin illustrated not only organic change, but social and political change as well. Throughout The Botanic Garden, Darwin endorses the ideals of the American and French revolutions and criticizes slavery. His celebration of technological progress in The Economy of Vegetation suggests that social and scientific progress are part of a single evolutionary process. Humanity was improving, moving towards perfection, as evidenced by abolitionism and the broadening of political rights. Gender The Love of the Plants, however, while opening up the world of botany to the non-specialist and to women in particular, reinforced conventional gender stereotypes. Darwin's images “remained deeply polarized between the chaste, blushing virgin and the seductive predatory woman, the modest shepherdess and the powerful queen.” Although Darwin gives plant-women the central role in each vignette (a reversal of Linnaeus's classification scheme, which focuses on the male), few of the representations stray from stereotypical images of women. When the female and male reproductive organs are in a 1:1 ratio in a plant, Darwin represents traditional couplings. The women are “playful”, “chaste”, “gentle” and “blooming”. When the ratio is 1:2-4, the female becomes a “helpmate” or “associate” to the males, who have separate bonds to their “brothers”. Once he reaches 1:5-6, however, Darwin presents women as “seductive or wanton” or, at the other extreme, “needing protection”. By 1:8+, he presents “unambiguous metaphors of power and command, [with the woman] being pictured as a saint, a reigning sovereign, a sorceress, a proto-industrialist . . . a priestess”. The images also present a largely positive view of the relationship between the sexes; there is no rape or sexual violence of any kind, elements central to much of Ovid and Linnaeus. There is also no representation of the marriage market, divorce or adultery (with one exception); the poem is largely pastoral. There are also no representations of intelligent women or women writers, although Darwin knew quite a few. The exception is the “Botanic Muse”, who has the botanical knowledge that the poem imparts; however, as Browne argues, few readers in the eighteenth century would have seen this as a liberating image for women since they would have been skeptical that a woman could have written the poem and inhabited