ON VARIATION 
ment—what an infinite possibility of combinations 
this opens up! 
Truly of a million geranium blossoms no two 
could be exactly alike—nor any two of their five 
million petals—nor any two of their ten million 
stamens—nor any two of their hundred million 
honey glands—nor any two of their billion pollen 
granules! 
What we have seen in the geranium—those 
seed-like eggs, the sticky stigma and that micro- 
scopic pollen dust, we may see in some form or 
other in every plant that grows. 
The act which we might have performed to 
produce a new geranium plant—the combination 
of one of those seeds with some of that pollen— 
is going on about us always, everywhere—with the 
bees, and the butterflies, and the birds, and the 
winds, and a score of other agencies acting to 
effect those combinations. 
Which is the reason for the candy factory at the 
bottom of every geranium’s little central well. And 
for those brilliant petals, and that delicate scent, 
and the picket arrangement of the stamen stalks, 
and the crosswise poise of their pollen-bearing 
anthers, and the central pistil stalk which rises 
upward from the egg nest—and everything that is 
[77] 
