THE PEDIGREE OF WHEAT. 669 



us by the lilies themselves, and travel down the other line of degen- 

 eracy and degradation which leads us on to the grasses and the cereals, 

 including at last our own familiar cultivated wheat. Any trinary 

 flower with three calyx-pieces, three petals, six stamens, and a three- 

 celled pistil not concealed within an inclosing tube, is said to be a lily, 

 as long as it possesses brightly colored and delicate petals. There are, 

 however, a large number of somewhat specialized lilies with very 

 small and inconspicuous petals, which have been artificially separated 

 by botanists as the rush family, not because they were really different 

 in any important point of structure from the acknowledged lilies, but 

 merely because they had not got such brilliant and handsome blossoms. 

 These despised and neglected plants, however, supply us with the first 

 downward step on the path of degeneracy which leads at last to the 

 grasses, and they may be considered as intermediate stages in the scale 

 of degradation, fortunately preserved for us by exceptional circum- 

 stances to the present day. Even among the true lilies, there are 

 some, like the garlic and onion tribe, which show considerable marks 

 of degeneration, owing to some decline from the type of insect fer- 

 tilization to the undesirable habit of fertilizing themselves. Thus, 

 while our common English rampsons or wild garlic has pretty and 

 conspicuous white blossoms, some other members of the tribe, such as 

 the crow allium, have very small greenish flowers, often reduced to 

 mere shapeless bulbs. Among the true rushes, however, the course of 

 development has been somewhat different. These water-weeds have 

 acquired the habit of trusting for fertilization to the wind, which car- 

 ries the pollen of one blossom to the sensitive surface of another, per- 

 haps at less trouble and expense to the parent plant than would be 

 necessary for the allurement of bees or flies by all the bribes of brill- 

 iant petals and honeyed secretions. To effect this object, their stamens 

 hang out pensile to the breeze, on long, slender filaments, so lightly 

 poised that the merest breath of air amply suffices to dislodge the 

 pollen : while the sensitive surface of the ovaries is prolonged into a 

 branched and feathery process, seen under the microscope to be studded 

 with adhesive glandular knobs, which readily catch and retain every 

 golden grain of the fertilizing powder which may chance to be wafted 

 toward them on the wings of the wind. Under such circumstances, 

 the rush kind could only lose by possessing brightly colored and at- 

 tractive petals, which would induce insects uselessly to plunder their 

 precious stores : and so all those rushes which showed any tendency 

 in that direction would soon be weeded out by natural selection ; while 

 those which produced only dry and inconspicuous petals would become 

 the parents of future generations, and would hand on their own pecul- 

 iarities to their descendants after them. Thus the existing: rushes are 

 all plain little lilies with dry, brownish flowers, specially adapted to 

 wind-fertilization alone. 



Among the rushes themselves, again, there are various levels of 



