VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 99 



adjacent parts to adhere at the base; and in cer 

 tain blossoms this tendency to adhesion must 

 have benefited the plant, because it would allow 

 the proper fertilising insect to get in with ease, 

 and to find his way at once to the stamens and 

 stigma or sensitive surface. The consequence is 

 that the majority of the higher plants have now 

 corollas in a single piece ; and most of these are 

 also coloured red, blue, or purple. Still, even 

 now many of them retain marks of the original 

 five petals. For instance, the harebell has the 

 edge of the corolla vandyked into five marked 

 lobes; while in the primrose, only the base of the 

 corolla forms a tube or united pipe, the outer 

 part being composed of five deeply-cut lobes, 

 reminiscences of the five original petals. Indeed, 

 some relations of the primrose, such as the pim- 

 pernel and the woodland loose-strife, have the 

 petals only slightly united at the base, and would 

 hardly be noticed by a casual observer as possess- 

 ing a tubular corolla. 



There is one marriage custom of the primrose, 

 however, so very interesting that we must not 

 pass it by even in so brief a survey. Most chil- 

 dren are aware that we have in our woods two 

 kinds of primroses, w T hich they know respectively 

 as pin-eyed and thrum-eyed. In the pin-eyed 

 form (Fig. 18), only the little round stigma is 

 visible at the top of the pipe, while the stamens, 

 here joined with the corolla-tube, hang out like 

 little bags half-way down the neck of it. In the 

 thrum-eyed form (Fig. 19), on the other hand, 

 only the stamens are visible at the top of the 

 tube, while the stigma, erected on a much shorter 

 style, occupies just the same place in the tube 

 that the stamens occupied in the sister blossom. 



