126 TYPES OF BRITISH PLANTS 
sible for many cases of poisoning of children, who have 
been unable to believe that such bright colouring was not 
a sign of fine flavour. Probably the present generation 
does not read Mrs. Turner's Cautionary Stories for 
Children, with their Draconic punishments and a death- 
rate worthy of the last scene in Hamlet, but there is 
one delightful couplet in the dreadful story of the fate 
of two infants, which always pleases me. 
“¢ Now had these children understood 
That fruit in lanes is seldom good,” 
they would not have expired in such awful agony as is 
assigned their portion for a solemn warning. 
However, to return from the high regions of moral 
philosophy to our plants, let us examine the Arum a little 
more closely, with the help of the illustration. The club- 
shaped purple top is not a gigantic pistil, as one might be 
tempted to imagine, but only a prolongation of the flower- 
ing stem. Its colour and its smell are supposed to attract 
the flies which are to help in fertilising the flowers, as we 
shall see ina moment. ‘The first ring, going downward, is 
composed of modified stamens, which have no anthers, 
and produce no pollen, but are set around the club 
and form a fence of stiff bristles, pointing downwards 
and spreading outwards to the sheath, which is itself 
a big bract. Beneath these bristles come the true 
stamens, and beneath them the ring of pistils and embryo 
seeds. 
Fertilisation here would seem a very easy matter, for the 
pollen might simply drop down upon the stigmas below. 
But the arum plants do not take this course. They have 
found (to put it figuratively) that it is best to get pollen 
