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Each carpel bears five longitudinal prominent ribs and several, often four, lesser intermediate ones, in the intervals between which numerous oil ducts have their openings from the interior of the fruit. The oil is generally found in more or less abundance also in other parts of the plant, but is usually most plentiful in the fruits.
This pistil consists of a number of carpels, arranged in many rows very regularly on a central receptacle; each carpel has a style, ending in a slightly-lobed stigma; and an ovary, wherein lies one single ovule, or young seed. The course of the transformation of this apparatus into fruit is highly curious and interesting.
That part of the carpel called the ovary, which encloses the seed, thickens, and changes into a fleshy substance, which, as the fruit matures, softens, and becomes a juicy, and often delicious pulp; this is the part which we eat in the plum, cherry, apricot, peach, and all which we call stone-fruits.
In the dividing of the two growth-principles in the plant through the formation of carpel and pistil, on the one hand, and the pollen-bearing stamens on the other, and in their reunion through the coming together of the pollen with the seed, Goethe recognized a metamorphosis of the process of anastomosis at a higher level. His vision of it caused him to term it 'spiritual anastomosis'.
For in continuance of the vertical principle of the plant, the pistil and carpel represent the male aspect in the process of spiritual anastomosis, and the mobile, wind- or insect-borne pollen, in continuing the spiral principle, represents the female part.
An ècritoire occupies one panel, a bookstand the other, and a rich coffer for jewels forms a pendant to a similar one for lace, or India shawls. A carpel of uncut pile, of a pale blue, a silver lamp, and a Psyche glass, the ornaments silvered to correspond with the decorations of the chamber, complete the furniture.
One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heard to cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries in the stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy that is to say, the formation of colours, of smell, and of taste."
It is then dropped or carried by some external agent, wind, water or some member of the animal kingdom, on to the receptive surface of the carpel of the same or another flower. The carpel, or aggregate of carpels forming the pistil or gynaeceum, comprises an ovary containing one or more ovules and a receptive surface or stigma; the stigma is sometimes carried up on a style.
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