THE AMARYLLIS 259 



an added sense of wonderment that enhances the 

 satisfaction with which the flower is viewed, and 

 gives a pleasurable stimulus to the imagination. 



So it may be assumed that the task of develop- 

 ing this unusual flower was a task quite worth the 

 doing. It called for many years of earnest effort, 

 of patient waiting, and of intelligent selection. 

 But the results fully justify the effort. 



The story of the difficulties encountered in the 

 early day of my experiments with the amaryllis 

 in effecting cross- fertilization of the flower has 

 been told in an earlier chapter. The reader will re- 

 call that I was first unaware that the pistil of the 

 flower matures at a later date than the stamens ; 

 hence that for a time I applied pollen carefully 

 to the pistil of flower after flower before it had 

 attained the receptive stage, and so failed to get 

 any results. 



But in due course I learned that the pollen 

 must be taken to the pistil of a flower that has 

 shed its own pollen several days earlier and when 

 I understood this simple feature of the technique 

 of cross-fertilizing the amaryllis, I had no further 

 difficulty as to that part of the experiment. 



MATERIALS FOR THE EXPERIMENT 



The material with which I began my experi- 

 ments consisted of a few familiar species of the 



