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Updated: May 25, 2025
If this bee became extinct, the plant would die out; how can such a development be advantageous to it? But the contrivances by which this process of fertilization is secured are so marvellous, that I confess I am completely staggered by the idea that these contrivances have been caused by the self-growth and adaptation of the plant without guidance.
"Increase and multiply" is so obviously the command of Nature that the Hebrews, with their usual insight, unhesitatingly dared to place it in the mouth of Jehovah. But the hymen is a barrier to fertilization.
And yet, when we see with what sureness and precision climbing plants use their tendrils, what marvelously combined manoeuvres the orchids perform to procure their fertilization by means of insects, how can we help thinking that these are so many instincts? This is not saying that the theory of the neo-Darwinians must be altogether rejected, any more than that of the neo-Lamarckians.
If, on the other hand, the endosperm is the product of an act of fertilization as definite as that giving rise to the embryo itself, we have to recognize that twin-plants are produced within the embryo-sac one, the embryo, which becomes the angiospermous plant, the other, the endosperm, a short-lived, undifferentiated nurse to assist in the nutrition of the former, even as the subsidiary embryos in a pluri-embryonic Gymnosperm may facilitate the nutrition of the dominant one.
In fact, all the different organs which the plant produces within its life cycle foliage, calyx, corolla, organs of fertilization, fruit and seed are metamorphoses of one and the same organ. Man has long learnt to make use of this law of metamorphosis in the plant for what is called doubling the flower of a certain species.
The Golden Bough mentions many of these, including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization the Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine.
We would cease to fertilize for a time and to regulate irrigation so that the trees will have enough to be thrifty without undertaking excessive growth. Such soil as you describe is sometimes very rich at the beginning in available plant food, and fertilization should be delayed until this excess has been appropriated by the tree. Budding or Grafting in Orange Orchard.
Darwin gives a series of the most wonderful and minute contrivances by which the visits of insects are utilized for the fertilization of orchids, structures so wonderful that nothing could well be more so, except the attribution of their origin to minute, fortuitous, and indefinite variation.
Raunkiaer, who has studied experimentally a dozen types from Denmark, found them constant, but observed that some of them have no pollen at all, while in others the pollen, though present, is impotent. It does not germinate on the stigma, cannot produce the ordinary tube, and hence has no fertilizing power. But the young ovaries do not need such fertilization. They are sufficient unto themselves.
The sooner they live their lives and the sooner they die, the better for the earth. It needs fertilization. Were we as mentally progressive as we are materially advanced, what a wonderful and magnificent improvement over the present living conditions we would be enjoying!
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