The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

VEGETABLE LIFE

get dusted with the tiny yellow grains. The insects, not satiated, fly to another buttercup to continue the meal; looking for more nectar they rub up against one or more of the stigmas and leave a few of the precious yellow grains upon them—and thus the egg-cells are fertilized. Most of the gaily coloured flowers with which the reader is familiar work in the same way as the buttercup ; their sepals, petals, mectaries, stamens, ovaries, and stigmas can be readily identified. The flower may be twisted up into a more or less elaborate shape, as in snapdragon or monkshood or columbine. And the nonbotanical reader may have trouble in finding parts of the daisies and dandelions, which are not single flowers at all but bunches of a great number of curiously made little flowers crowded together. But with a hand-lens even this mystery may be unravelled without serious difficulty. There are many ingenious modifications of the scheme ; flowers may specialize, for example, in the attraction and utilization of particular kinds of insects. In general, the colours and perfumes of flowers play the part of advertisements, the honey that of a fee, and the Insects are busy gobetweens between stamens and _ stigmas, collecting a heavy bribe at both ends of

Fig. 107.

ropods. Most of the flowers that attract casual notice are pollinated by insects for the very good reason that the petals and perfume that attract us are actually intended to draw

Ovaries Nectary

The Buttercup flower.

their fertilizin £ Below, left, a cluster of fruits ; right, a single flower cut across to show ws construction.

journey.

But insects are by no means indispensable to the vegetable kingdom. It is just a way in which immobile plants have utilized the abundance and restless prevalence of arth-

the six-legged carriers, but, there are other ways of securing pollination, _and many piants could get on perfectly well if there were no insects at all in the world. Grasses, for

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