THE PEDIGREE OF WHEAT. 671 



of flowers are combined in each head. From an ancestral form not 

 unlike this, but still more like the wood-rushes, we must get both our 

 sedges and our grasses. And though the sedges themselves do not 

 stand in the direct line of descent to wheat and the other cereals, they 

 are yet so valuable as an illustration from their points of analogy and 

 of difference that we must turn aside for a moment to examine the 

 gradual course of their evolution. 



The simplest and most primitive sedges now surviving, though 

 very degenerate in type, yet retain some distinct traces of their deri- 

 vation from earlier rush-like and lily-like ancestors. In the earliest 

 existing type, known as scirpus, the calyx and petals, which were 

 brightly colored in the lilies, and which were reduced to six brown 

 scales in the rushes, have undergone a further degradation to the form 

 of six small, dry bristles, which now merely remain as rudimentary relics 

 of a once useful and beautiful structure. In some species of scirpus, 

 too, the number of these bristles is reduced from six to four or three. 

 There is still one whorl of three stamens, however ; but the second 

 whorl has disappeared ; while the pistil now contains only one seed 

 instead of three ; though it still retains some trace of the original 

 three cells in the fact that there are three sensitive surfaces, united 

 together at their base into one stalk or style. Each such diminution 

 in the number of seeds is always accompanied by an increase in the 

 effectiveness of those which remain ; the difference is just analogous 

 to that between the myriad ill-provided eggs of the cod, whose young 

 fry are for the most part snapped up as soon as hatched, and the two 

 or three eggs of birds, which watch their brood with such tender care, 

 or the single young of cows, horses, and elephants, which guard their 

 calves or foals almost up to the age of full maturity. What the bird 

 or the animal effects by constant feeding with worms or milk, the plant 

 effects by storing its seed with assorted food-stuffs for the sprouting 

 embryo. 



In the more advanced or more degenerate sedges we get still fur- 

 ther differentiation for the special function of wind-fertilization. Take 

 as an example of these most developed types, on this line of develop- 

 ment, the common English group of carices. In these the flowers have 

 absolutely lost all trace of a perianth (that is to say, of the calyx and 

 petals), for they do not possess even the six diminutive bristles wdiich 

 form the last relics of those organs in their allies, the scirpus group. 

 Each flower is either male or female that is to say, it consists of 

 stamens or ovaries alone. The male flowers are represented by a single 

 scale or bract, inclosing three stamens ; and in some species even the 

 stamens are reduced to a pair, so that all trace of the original trinary 

 arrangement is absolutely lost. The female flowers are represented 

 by a single ovary, inclosed in a sort of loose bag, which may perhaps 

 be the final rudiment of a tubular, bell-shaped corolla like that of the 

 hyacinth. This ovary contains a single seed, but its shape is often 



