The Origin of Wheat. 135 



inquiry is the primitive and undifferentiated ancestral 

 flowering plant. Into the previous history of the line 

 from which the cereals are ultimately descended, I do 

 not propose here to enter. It must suffice for our 

 present purpose to say dogmatically that the flowering 

 plants as a whole derive their origin from a still 

 earlier flowerless stock, akin in many points to the 

 ferns and the club-mosses, but differing from them in 

 the relatively important part borne in its economy by 

 the mechanism for cross-fertilisation. The earliest 

 flowering plant of the great monocotyledonous divi- 

 sion (the only one with which we shall here have 

 anything to do) started apparently by possessing a 

 very simple and inconspicuous blossom, with a central 

 row of three ovaries, surrounded by two or more rows 

 of three stamens each, without any coloured petals or 

 other ornamental adjuncts of any sort. I need hardly 

 here explain even to the unbotanical reader that the 

 ovaries contain the embryo seeds, and that they only 

 swell into fertile fruits after they have been duly 

 impregnated by pollen from the stamens, preferably 

 those of another plant, or at least of another blossom 

 on the same stem. Seeds fertilised by pollen from 

 their own flower, as Mr. Darwin has shown, produce 

 relatively weak and sickly seedlings ; seeds fertilised 

 by pollen from a sister plant of the same species 



