352 REV. GEORGE HENSLOW ON THE 
Mr. Darwin has devoted a chapter, in his ‘Forms of Flowers, to a description of these — 
peculiar and cleistogamous flowers, to which the reader is referred for full details. I | 
would only remark that I am fully convinced that they are, in the first place, arrested 
flower-buds; but the arrest is accompanied with, on the one had, the suppression of 
special structures adapted for insect agency ` and, on the other, it is supplemented by 
special facilities for seeuring self-fertilization. In no case do I believe they represent 
primitive forms of flowers, as Mr. Dyer suggested (‘ Nature,’ vol. xv. p. 331), who says :— 
“The view by which flowers are regarded as originally hermaphrodite instead of, as Mr. Darwin sug- 
gests, monccious, further supplies a very simple explanation of the otherwise almost inexplicable.nature - 
of cleistogene flowers. These being inconspicuots, and self-fertilizing, are probably survivals of the ` 
original type." : 
That flowers were originally hermaphrodite, I fully believe, but certainly not neces- 
sarily cleistogamous, nor that existing cleistogamous flowers are survivals. They appear — 
to me to be undoubtedly degradations, for at least two, if not more, reasons. One is the ` 
presence of the corolla; the other that peculiarities of structure formerly concerned with ` 
insect fertilization are not always completely lost, as, for example, the lip of the corolla | 
in Lamium amplexicaule and its four stamens. Moreover, transitional conditions may 
often be found between ordinary flowers and the cleistogamous. Thus in strongly 
grown garden-plants of Viola odorata the cleistogamous buds of the summer often have — 
spurs, and the stamens retain the nectariferous appendages, where they can be of no ` 
possible use whatever. Transitional conditions also occur with other plants that bear - 
cleistogamous flowers, fully proving that they are really transformed states of the normal 3 
blossoms. (See Tab. X LIV. figs. 4 a, b, c, d, and 13 a, b.) | 
PoryeALEX.— The remarkable structure of Polygala is clearly correlated to i 
fertilization, yet the British species appear to be adapted to self-fertilization as well. 
-Hildebrand has described it in * Bot. Zeit., Sept. 6, 1867, from whose figures I have made ` 
the drawings in Tab. XLIV. figs. 7 d & e. Fig. e represents a case where an insect has 
deposited the pollen on the anterior side of the stigma; fig. d one in which the spoon- — 
shaped extremity has caught the pollen poured into it from the anthers, which have 
grasped the edges of the spoon and, as it were, emptied themselves into it. The stigma 
has recurved upwards, to bring the viscous surface in contact with the pollen. Ina white 
variety of which I found a few specimens, the corolla was completely wrapped round the 
anthers and stigma, as seen in fig. 7a; and the anthers gripped the two sides of the 
pistil just on a level with the very.viscid stigma, into which many pollen-tubes were 
penetrating, so that the pollen adhered to it directly, without falling into the. spoon i at 
all (fig. 7). Hence, if my observations were correct (but I had too few to render them 
quite satisfactory), there was a slight difference between the method of self-fertilization 
in my ease to that described by Hildebrand. It may be observed here, however, that 
slight variations such as this are not unique. Mr. Darwin records variations in the 
Jength of the stamen in Canna (1. c. p. 230) ; and I have reasons for suspecting individual 
plants of species vary the processes under different circumstances; and a contrivance 
which may occur on one plant may not necessarily be found in another individual of ` 
