174 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



more are the now useless relics of the petals crowded out 

 between their really serviceable organs. 



And now if we turn to the cat's-tails or reed-maces 

 that grow hard by out of the water itself, we can see the 

 same process carried to the furthest possible extreme of 

 degradation. I suppose everybody knows them by some 

 name or other, as black-cap rushes or something of the 

 sort those great smooth round stems, four or live feet 

 high, surmounted by a thick woolly- looking black cylin- 

 der by way of a head. In reality, this cylinder is an 

 immense mass of such wind-fertilized flowers, crowded 

 together literally by myriads along a dense spike on the 

 stem. The top part, which grows fluffy and withers 

 after a short time, consists of the male blossoms, here 

 reduced to naked stamens only, with a few inconspicu- 

 ous hairs scattered among them to represent the scales 

 that once were petals. The lower part, which becomes 

 thicker and longer as the autumn wears away, consists of 

 the female flowers, reduced to very minute ovaries, each 

 surrounded by a bundle of small hairs, which similarly 

 stand for the three or six green scales of the female bur- 

 reed. Each ovary is now so extremely small that you 

 cannot distinguish them separately at all with the naked 

 eye ; if you cut the spike across, the only thing you can 

 see is a thick mass of soft brownish hairs, black at the 

 tips and paler inside toward the central stalk. 



How many hundreds of thousands of flowers are thus 

 cribbed and cabined on a single stem nobody has ever 

 had the patience to count ; a mere pinch pulled out 

 between the finger and thumb displays under the micro- 

 scope an apparently infinite number of distinct florets, 

 each with a single tiny ovary and a fluffy envelope of 

 small hairs. Yet all this degradation, as we rightly ac- 

 count it, is strictly in adaptation to the peculiar habits of 



