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We descend, skirting for some distance the monastery walls, over which patches of ivy hang like green shawls. There are flowers in profusion, scented violets, daisies, dandelions, and crocuses, large and of the richest variety, with orange pistils, and stamens purple and violet, the back of every alternate leaf exquisitely penciled.
Their dry and formal knowledge was without interest, mere lists of petals and pistils, a dried herbarium of plants that fell to pieces at the touch of the fingers. Only by chipping away at hard old Latin, contracted and dogged in more senses than one, and by gathering together scattered passages in classic authors, could anything be learned.
At the top of the stairs something a door is in the way. I go by it. A child is there. Again: I am crossing a level field and come upon little star-like flowers which I try to analyse. I find many with pistils but no stamens, the pollen bearing organs which effect fertilization. I wonder if they will keep fresh until I reach home. Once more: I approach a city.
It had twelve petals, limpid white on the borders shading to deep blue in the center-from which the cream-colored stamen surrounded by transparent pistils sprang to burst into a golden glory of pollen that dripped in tiny yellow flecks to the broad petals below. It was a magnificent flower. There was nothing like it on Beta.
In our next lecture we shall deal with a curious phenomenon in poppies, consisting in the change of the stamens into pistils and giving rise to a bright crown of secondary capsules around the central one. Similar anomalies may be occasionally met with in other species of the same genus. But they are rare, and may show the conversion of only a single stamen in the described manner.
No naturalist doubts the advantage of what has been called the "physiological division of labour;" hence we may believe that it would be advantageous to a plant to produce stamens alone in one flower or on one whole plant, and pistils alone in another flower or on another plant.
The bundles of fucus collected by M. Bonpland were completely identical with the specimens given us by the learned authors of the Flora of Peru. On examining both with the microscope, we found that the supposed parts of fructification, the stamina and pistils, belong to a new genus, of the family of the Ceratophytae.
Individual specimens may occur, which cannot produce any seed, but then others of the same lot may be as fertile as can be desired. As a whole, such double varieties are regularly propagated by seed. Petalomany is the tendency of the axis of some flowers never to make any stamens or pistils, not even in altered or rudimentary form.
'Well, one thing is certain: Professor Pinnie never knew the STATE of his own flora, or at least he kept his wife sorting and arranging his specimens all the time; and I think he's a regular old frump, said Polly, irreverently, but meeting Aunt Truth's reproving glance, which brought a blush and a whispered 'Excuse me, she went on, 'Well, what I mean is, he doesn't know any more than other people, after all; for he cares for nothing but bushes and herbs and seeds and shrubs and roots and stamens and pistils; and he can't tell whether a flower is lovely or not, he is so crazy to find out where it belongs and tie a tag round it.
Gordon wuz, an' arfter some chattin' Mr. Hennin step' off 'bout fur ez 'cross dis road, or mebbe it mout be a little furder; an' den I seed 'em th'oo de bushes loadin' de pistils, an' talk a little while; an' den Marse Chan an' ole Cun'l Chahmb'lin walked up wid de pistils in dey han's, an' Marse Chan he stood wid his face right to'ds de sun.
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