THE FLOWER. 57 



the perfectly infused colour of the petals, you have, as I said, 

 the central being of the flower. All the other parts of it are 

 necessary, but we must follow them out in order. 



16. Looking down into the cup, you see the green boss di- 

 vided by a black star, of six rays only, and surrounded by a 

 few black spots. My rough-nurtured poppy contents itself with 

 these for its centre ; a rich one would have had the green boss 

 divided by a dozen of rays, and surrounded by a dark crowd 

 of crested threads. 



This green boss is called by botanists the pistil, which 

 word consists of the two first syllables of the Latin pistil- 

 lum, otherwise more familiarly Englished into ' pestle.' The 

 meaning of the botanical word is of course, also, that the cen- 

 tral part of a flower-cup has to it something of the relations 

 that a pestle has to a mortar ! Practically, however, as this 

 pestle has no pounding functions, I think the word is mislead- 

 ing as well as ungraceful ; and that we may find a better one 

 after looking a little closer into the matter. For this pestle 

 is divided generally into three very distinct parts : there is a 

 storehouse at the bottom of it for the seeds of the plant ; 

 above this, a shaft, often of considerable length in deep cups, 

 rising to the level of their upper edge, or above it ; and at 

 the top of these shafts an expanded crest. This shaft the 

 botanists call ' style,' from the Greek word for a pillar ; and 

 the crest of it I do not know why stigma, from the Greek 

 word for ' spot.' The storehouse for the seeds they call the 

 ' ovary,' from the Latin ovum, an egg. So you have two- 

 thirds of a Latin word, (pistil) awkwardly and disagreeably 

 edged in between pestle and pistol for the whole thing ; you 

 have an English-Latin word (ovary) for the bottom of it ; an 

 English-Greek word (style) for the middle ; and a pure Greek 

 word (stigma) for the top. 



17. This is a great mess of language, and all the worse 

 that the word style and stigma have both of them quite dif- 

 ferent senses in ordinary and scholarly English from this 

 forced botanical one. And I will venture therefore, for my 

 own pupils, to put the four names altogether into English. 

 Instead of calling the whole thing a pistil, I shall simply call 



