Minnesota Plant Life. 517 



microscopic body, from the undistributed large-spore within 

 the rudimentary seed. The male, therefore, has come to be 

 a degenerate, cobweb-like organism that lives parasitically on 

 tissues near the spot where the female is situated. Thus pollen 

 spores must be distributed not haphazard, as may be the spores 

 of liverworts, mosses and ferns, but to some particular spot — 

 either to the end of the rudimentary seed, as in lower seed 

 plants such as pines, or, as in higher seed plants, to a special 

 area known as the stigma. Since, further, all enlargements of 

 experience are generally valuable for a plant as for an animal 

 species, it happens that very often pollen spores are carried from 

 one flower to stigmas of another, perhaps on another plant. 

 This is called cross-pollination — a very different matter from 

 cross-fecundation with which it must not be confused. For 

 generations a false analogy has existed in the minds of almost 

 every one, botanists included, that there is some comparison be- 

 tween pollination and a breeding act. There is no comparison ; 

 the two processes are absolutely distinct. Pollination is merely 

 a special type of spore distribution of which the "puff of smoke" 

 from a puff-ball is a more general type. Fecundation, — the 

 blending of sperm and ^gg, — is an entirely different matter. 

 In flowering plant species, after pollination has occurred and 

 small spores have been placed in a position where they can 

 germinate, male plants come into existence and the breeding- 

 act takes place between microscopic organisms living parasit- 

 ically upon the tissues of the spore-producing individual of their 

 species. To speak of the "sexes" of flowers, or to call stamens 

 "male" structures, or to name one cottonwood tree a male 

 and the other a female, is in every instance an indication of 

 ignorance or sloth, or it is a concession to the ignorance assumed 

 to exist among one's hearers. 



The colors, forms, structures, perfumes, secretions, positions, 

 divisions of labor, and succession of flowers are all intimately 

 connected with pollen-distributing devices. To discuss them 

 in detail would require not merely volumes but libraries. It 

 must suffice here to remark that every special type of flower 

 has its own particular mechanism for spore distribution. It 

 may utilize currents of air or water, or more commonly insects. 

 Thus, by their interrelations, the two groups of living things, 



