THE FLOWER. 163 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE FLO WEE. 



SECTION I. ITS NATURE, PARTS, AND METAMORPHY. 



293. FLOWER-BUDS are homologous with (morphologically an- 

 swering to) leaf-buds, and they occupy the same positions. (266.) 

 A FLOWER is a simple axis or a terminal portion of one, in a 

 phomogamous plant, with its leaves developed in special forms, 

 and subservient to sexual reproduction instead of vegetation. 



294. In passing from vegetation to reproduction, it is not 

 always easy to determine exactly where the flower begins. The 

 same axis which bears a flower or floral organs at summit bears 

 vegetative leaves or foliage below. Or when it does not, as 

 when an axillary flower-stalk or pedicel is bractless, the change 

 to actual organs of reproduction is seldom abrupt. Usually 

 there are floral envelopes, within and under the protection of 

 which in the bud the essential organs of the flower are formed. 

 Some or all of these protecting parts, in very many flowers, are 

 either obvious leaves or sufficiently foliaceous to suggest their 

 leafy nature ; and even when the texture is delicate, and other 

 colors take the place of the sober green of vegetation, they are 

 still popularly said to be the leaves of the blossom. These pro- 

 tecting and often showy parts, though not themselves directly 

 subservient to reproduction, have always been accounted as 

 parts of the flower. 1 Between the lowest or outermost of these 

 and the bractlets and bracts there are various and sometimes 

 complete gradations. The axis itself occasionally undergoes 

 changes in such a way as to render the determination of the 

 actual beginning of the flower somewhat arbitrary. Moreover, 

 the flower itself is extremely various in different plants, in some 

 consisting of a great number of pieces, in others of few or only 

 one ; in some the constituent pieces are separate, in others 

 combined. The flower is best understood, therefore, by taking 

 some particular specimen or class of flowers as a representative 



1 Indeed, the colored leaves, or envelopes in whatever form, essentially 

 were the flower in most of the ante-Linnaean definitions (that of Ludwig 

 excepted), as they are still mainly so in popular apprehension. 



