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The fruit is equally transparent, beautiful, mild, and agreeable in flavor, while the bush is enormously productive, and shapely in form, if properly trained and fertilized. While the white currants are such favorites, I do not undervalue the red. Indeed, were I restricted to one variety, it should be the old Dutch Red of our fathers, or, more properly, of our grandmothers.
Vaucheria has, however, a second and far higher mode of reproduction, viz., by means of fertilized cells, the true oospores, which, lying dormant as resting spores during the winter, are endowed with new life by the rejuvenating influences of spring.
You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but all animal life is fed. Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds, form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or grass before it can become meat for man.
Let us consider this fertilized egg the contributions of the father and the mother. The total length of the spermatozoon is only about 1/300 of an inch, and 4/5 of this is the tail. This tail does not enter the egg, and has no other known function than that of a propeller. Its movement has been studied and found to be about 1/8 of an inch per minute. Only the head and neck enter the egg.
On the other hand, in some of the eastern countries menstruation was regarded as sacred, and the first menstrual discharge was considered so valuable that premenstrual marriages were inaugurated in order that the first ovum might not be wasted, but fertilized, because it was supposed to be the purest and best for the purpose.
It gives rise to the so-called "showers of sulphur," which every one has heard of. Contrast this with one of the close-fertilized flowers of a violet, in which there are not many times more grains of pollen produced than there are of seeds to be fertilized; or with an orchis-flower, in which the proportion is not widely different.
The system of pipes by which the land is fertilized is as fully hidden from his view as are, for example, the tributary sewage-pipes beneath the city pavements.
The whole of this part of the property was now acquired by the Froments two hundred acres of land where, hitherto, only water plants had grown, but which now was given over to cultivation, and yielded abundant crops. And the new springs, turned into canals on every side, again carried beneficent life to the sandy slopes, and fertilized them.
Its root lay deep in soft, moist earth well fertilized and cared for; its leaves were washed anew each evening with refreshing spray from the hose that played over it.
The previous discoveries of Grew and Linnæus were right so far as they went viz., "the pollen must reach the stigma" but those learned authorities had missed the true secret of the process. He then announced his startling theory: 1. "Flowers are fertilized by insects."
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