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Updated: May 11, 2025
We would rather, if space permitted, attempt an analysis of the less known, but not less masterly, subsidiary essays, upon the various arrangements for insuring cross-fertilization in flowers, for the climbing of plants, and the like.
"I am not concerned that the things presented in this little constructive endeavor will not find bodily incorporation in schools; for it is cross-fertilization and not grafting that has given us our richest varieties of fruits and flowers. This work is an attempt at spirit, not letter; at principle, not method." From the Author's Preface.
On his way in, what pollen he already may have collected on his furry back slips easily off on the very lip of the stigma which waits at the strategic point with the antlers crowding well forward, but firmly held a hair's breadth behind it. Thus each bloom is fertilized with the pollen from some other, insuring cross-fertilization.
Someway, it needs the stimulus from less closely related pollen in order to grow vigorously and perfectly. While the cross-fertilization of the same order of plants is so desirable, it is not possible for the pollen of one order to fertilize the ovules of another order. There must be a certain degree of similarity between flowers able to fertilize each other.
Israel was never left to settle down again into provincialism, but was stirred by the currents of the great world of thought that poured in upon her from Greece and Egypt, from Rome and the far East. "A cross-fertilization of ideas" was thus carried on by Providence. The result of grafting the richest varieties of thought upon such a sturdy stock could not fail of proving something rare and rich.
It is probable that an accessory cross-fertilization frequently results from a mass of the pollen falling directly upon the stigma of a neighboring blossom, or even upon its own stigma, but even in the latter case, as has been absolutely demonstrated as a general law by the experiments of Darwin, the pollen from a separate flower is almost invariably prepotent, and leads to the most perfect fruition, and thus to the survival of the fittest the cross-fertilized.
In the same paper I presented many illustrative examples among our common wild flowers possessing marvellous evolved devices, mechanisms, and peculiarities of form by which this necessary cross-fertilization was assured. Prior to Darwin's time the flower was a voice in the wilderness, heard only in faintest whispers, and by the few.
But here comes the remarkable and very exceptional provision to make this contact a certainty a suggestive structural feature of this flower of which I am surprised to find no mention either in our botanies or in the literature of cross-fertilization, so far as I am familiar with its bibliography. Even Dr.
It is very astonishing that this question should still be unsolved where so many individual trees bear atavistic branches that remain on them through long series of years. But then many such branches do not flower at all, or if they flower and bear seed, no care is taken to prevent cross-fertilization with the other flowers of the same plant, and the results have no scientific value.
The weight of this objection is obvious; but our ignorance of the conditions of fertility and sterility, the want of carefully conducted experiments extending over long series of years, and the strange anomalies presented by the results of the cross-fertilization of many plants, should all, as Mr. Darwin has urged, be taken into account in considering it. The eighth and last stands as follows:
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