86 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
have had origin in the amalgamation of four earpels 
possessed by a remote ancestor. It is crowned by a 
couple of stigma-lobes with a notch-like space between 
them. 
Now let us look at these several parts in the 
Wallflower, and see if we cannot get a note or two 
of interest from them, in further illustration of that 
ready adaptability to surrounding conditions which 
appears to be shared by all plants in some degree. 
The sepals of the Wallflower are long and stiff; they 
stand perfectly erect, and are distinguished as “ front,” 
“back,” and “side” sepals. There are, of course, two 
side sepals, and their edges overlap the back and 
front ones, so that a kind of square tube is formed. 
The side sepals differ from the others in the fact 
that their base is swollen into a little pouch. The 
four petals are arranged diagonally to the sepals, 
so that they fit into the spaces left between the 
pointed tips of each two neighbouring sepals. If 
we strip the sepals from a flower, we at once find 
that the petals, the moment they get out of sight in 
the sepal-tube, become exceedingly slender. This 
is another example of floral economy. ‘The plant 
has found it pay to adapt itself specially for the 
visits of long-tongued insects, but instead of develop- 
ing a long spur to its petals or sepals, lke the 
Columbine and Larkspur, or turning the entire flower 
into a long slender tube of one piece ike Honeysuckle 
and Convolvulus, it has lengthened and stiffened its 
sepals without uniting their edges, and has reduced 
the lower half of its petals to mere threads, the 
broad, heavy, and showy blades being supported by 
the tops of the sepals. 
