732 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Arabs of the desert, and one of which now waves its long houghs 

 in the breeze before ns, are all female ; the male or pollen-bearing 

 flowers of the date kind always grow on a separate tree ; and as 

 pollen is produced by them in vast quantities, it is not necessary 

 in palm-groves to have more than a single male stem to some forty 

 or fifty fruit-bearing individuals. The Arabs, therefore, never 

 raise their palms from seed, as they can not make sure of the sex 

 of seedlings ; they take suckers from the root of a female tree, 

 already known to be a good bearer of fine fruit ; and these suckers 

 not only follow the sex of the so-called mother, but also reproduce 

 its special peculiarities of flower and seed in every respect. They 

 can not fail to do so, indeed, seeing that they are part and parcel 

 of the original palm, actual members of the self -same plant ; just 

 as the various branches of an apple-tree all bear the same kind of 

 apples, or the boughs of a currant-bush all produce the self -same 

 currants. 



And now let us hark back, by way of contrast, to the case of the 

 pea, which is a true, distinct, individual plant, the product of a 

 veritable marriage union. Whence came it ? Was it born from 

 a pea-blossom ? So, indeed, we mostly imagine ; though very in- 

 correctly. As well say that a child is the son of his mother, but 

 not of his father, as that a pea is the seed produced by a pea- 

 flower. It is nothing of the sort. The whole secret of sex and 

 reproduction is bound up in this simple illustrative instance. The 

 pea is the product of two different pea-hlossoms. 



The mere accidental fact that each pea-blossom had stamens 

 and pistil in its own flower must not blind us to the truth of this 

 underlying principle of cross-fertilization, which every pea exem- 

 plifies for us as truly as every date or every melon. In the date 

 and the melon the flowers on one plant are all male or all female ; 

 on the pea- vine they are all hermaphrodite. But, none the less, 

 they intermarry. What happened when the pea was first launched 

 into life was briefly this : A row of peas grew in the garden of 

 the Moorish villa that gleams in the sun on the hill-side opposite ; 

 and on one of these vines hung a particular white-winged blossom, 

 which supplied the pollen for the production of this individual 

 pea. On another vine hung a second flower, from whose midst 

 protruded the pistil which was finally to grow out into the par- 

 ticular pod that contained my pea. A wandering bumble-bee, on 

 dinner intent, poked his long proboscis into pea-flower number 

 one, and, after rifling it of its honey, covered his hairy legs and 

 thighs, half accidentally, with abundant pollen from the sta- 

 mens, which formed a sheath or tube round its twisted style. Then 

 he flew away to pea-flower number two, and, in his clumsy attempts 

 to thrust his long sucker down its nectar-bearing throat, he 

 brushed a lot of number one's pollen from his legs and breast on 



