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Without the slightest hesitation he opened Plant's gate and walked to the verandah where the huge, unlovely hulk huddled in the doorway. There, with some loathing, he determined the fact that the man was indeed dead. Convinced as to this point, he returned to the street, and looked carefully up and down it. It was still quite deserted.
Every hybridizer knows how unfavourable exposure to wet is to the fertilisation of a flower, yet what a multitude of flowers have their anthers and stigmas fully exposed to the weather! but if an occasional cross be indispensable, the fullest freedom for the entrance of pollen from another individual will explain this state of exposure, more especially as the plant's own anthers and pistil generally stand so close together that self-fertilisation seems almost inevitable.
It seems the secrets of plant powers and influences yield themselves most readily to primitive peoples, at least one never hears of the knowledge coming from any other source. The Indian never concerns himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the plant's appearances and relations, but with what it can do for him.
These are the Aphides sometimes unprettily called plant-lice, and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed as "blight" and they nourish themselves on vegetable juices, that thin green blood which is the plant's life. This, then, is the fruit which the birds have, come to gather.
From this absolute zero of fertility, the pollen of different species of the same genus applied to the stigma of some one species, yields a perfect gradation in the number of seeds produced, up to nearly complete or even quite complete fertility; and, as we have seen, in certain abnormal cases, even to an excess of fertility, beyond that which the plant's own pollen will produce.
One day in the plant's blossoming time, I was slowly walking my pony through the dark bottle-green tufts, when a big yellowish-tawny owl got up a yard or so from the hoofs, and I instantly recognized it as the same sort of bird as our mysterious pigeon-killer.
We have met it in the distribution of function of the plant's organs of propagation, and we shall meet a further instance of it when studying the function of the human eye. Future investigation will have to find the principle common to all instances in nature where such an interchange of the poles prevails.
The simple fact of newness is nothing in any plant's favor. Unless it has real merit, it will not find purchasers after the first season. Better wait until you know what a plant is before investing in it. We have so many excellent plants with whose good qualities we are familiar that it is not necessary to run any risks of this kind.
Goethe now suggests that after looking at a convolvulus as it grows upwards around its support, one should first make this clearly present to one's inner eye, and then again picture the plant's growth without the vertical support, allowing instead the upward-growing plant inwardly to produce a vertical support for itself.
But see how this whole plant's lifelong stubbornness is broken simply by blending a new life with it, making, by crossing, a complete and powerful change in its life. Then when the break comes, fix it by these generations of patient supervision and selection, and the new plant sets out upon its new way never again to return to the old, its tenacious will broken and changed at last.
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