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Updated: June 21, 2025
The nodding flower that grew so gayly up above there was day by day ripening a golden dust called pollen; and every grain of this pollen and they were very small grains indeed knew perfectly well that the silken threads were tubes, and they felt an irresistible desire to enter the shining passages, and explore them to the very end: so one day, when the wind was tossing the whole blossoms this way and that, the pollen-grains danced out, and, sailing down on the soft breeze, each one crept in at the open door of a sea-green tube.
Whilst examining some pollen-grains on a damp surface, I saw the tubes exserted, and instantly rushed off to communicate my surprising discovery to him. Now I do not suppose any other professor of botany could have helped laughing at my coming in such a hurry to make such a communication.
It has likewise been raised from seeds collected in different years at the original station. It is also wholly pistillate. Apparently the anthers are robust, but they are dry, wrinkled and nearly devoid of contents. The inner wall of cells around the groups of pollen grow out instead of being resorbed, partly filling the cavity which is left free by the miscarriage of the pollen-grains.
"Side by side were their cradles, one beyond another in beautiful straight rows; and as the pollen-grains grew daily larger, the cradles also grew for their accommodation, until at last they felt themselves really full of sweet, delicious life; and those who lived at the tops of the rows peeped out from the opening of the dry leaves which wrapped them all together, and saw a little boy with his father coming through the cornfield, while yet every thing was beaded with dew, and the sun was scarcely an hour high.
The spikes would show exactly the same mixture as in the above case, but now this may be considered as conclusive proof that half the pollen-grains represent the quality of one parent and the other half the quality of the other. Another corollary of Mendel's law is the following. In each generation two groups return to purity, and one-half remains hybrid.
I have already mentioned its small corolla, surpassed by the lobes of the calyx and its capacity of self-fertilization. It has still other curious differentiating characters; the pollen grains, which are square in V. tricolor, are five-sided in V. arvensis. Some transgressive fluctuating variability may occur in both cases through the admixture of pollen-grains.
In other orchids the threads cohere at one end of the pollen-masses; and this forms the first or nascent trace of a caudicle. That this is the origin of the caudicle, even when of considerable length and highly developed, we have good evidence in the aborted pollen-grains which can sometimes be detected embedded within the central and solid parts.
Having found a female tree exactly sixty yards from a male tree, I put the stigmas of twenty flowers, taken from different branches, under the microscope, and on all, without exception, there were pollen-grains, and on some a profusion of pollen. As the wind had set for several days from the female to the male tree, the pollen could not thus have been carried.
With trimorphic plants there are three forms likewise differing in the lengths of their pistils and stamens, in the size and colour of the pollen-grains, and in some other respects; and as in each of the three forms there are two sets of stamens, the three forms possess altogether six sets of stamens and three kinds of pistils.
When a pollen-dusted bee alights on one of these maturer flowers the sticky end of the now depending style is gently rubbed by the bee's back and smeared with a few pollen-grains brought by the bee from a distant flower. These rapidly expand into "pollen tubes," or filaments, and, penetrating the long style, reach the egg-germs below.
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