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Updated: June 10, 2025
The pollen came from one parent and the ovule, which after fertilization swelled up into the seed, came from another. By this combination of two individuals new varieties become quite possible. Nature seems to be more concerned in improving her strain than in maintaining her older strains. In all of her lowest plants and animals she uses the asexual method of reproduction.
The chief of these characteristics are, that in the order Rosaceæ the calyx is in most cases formed of five lobes, with the petals and stamens rising from it, the latter being generally numerous; the ovaries are several, or solitary, each of one cell, including, in most cases, one ovule or incipient seed in some cases many the style being lateral or terminal.
If we examine the young ovule we find it apparently nothing but a little sac full of a semi-liquid substance. This semi-liquid substance, or at least a part of it, is alive and is very important. It is protoplasm, which is the only living substance; all the living parts of plants and animals are made from protoplasm. The pollen grain is also a little sac containing protoplasm.
The older child can add to his stock of facts, and one of the things he will be likely to want to know is how the little pollen grain up on the stigma can influence the ovule down in the ovary. We know how the ovule is formed. We know that it grows from the inside of the ovary.
Of his many important statements I will here give only a single one as an example, namely, that "every ovule in a pod of Crinum capense fertilised by C. revolutum produced a plant, which I never saw to occur in a case of its natural fecundation." So that here we have perfect, or even more than commonly perfect fertility, in a first cross between two distinct species.
Within the hard shell of the nut, among the mass of rich creamy substance, near the large end, is a small white lump like the stalk of a young mushroom, called the ovule. This little finger-like germ of the future tree gradually forces itself through one of the three eyes always to be found on the cocoanut. What giant power is concealed within that tiny ovule, apparently so soft and insignificant!
The pollen tube pushes straight toward the micropyle, enters into the ovule through the micropyle, and then the living substance it has carried all this distance in its tip breaks through its delicate wall and mingles with the living substance of the ovule. When this has happened, the ovule begins to grow and to develop into a seed.
Then why should they escape the common rule, which requires that every living creature, male as well as female, should come from a fertilized ovule? In its most solemn act, that of procreation, life is one and uniform; what it does here it does there and there and everywhere. What!
If, however, a contraceptive is not used and the sperm meets the ovule and development begins, any attempt at removing it or stopping its further growth is called abortion. There is no doubt that women are apt to look upon abortion as of little consequence and to treat it accordingly.
Such eggs may occur in a flock from the absence of the male, from his disinclination or physical inability to serve the hens, from the weakness or lack of vitality in the sperm cells, from his neglect of a particular hen, from lifelessness, or lack of vitality in the ovule, or from chance misses, by which some eggs fail to be reached by the sperm cells.
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