INGENUITY IN VARIATION 123 



of stamens — nor any two of their millions of 

 honey glands — nor any two of their thousand 

 million pollen granules. 



What we have seen in the dianthus — those 

 egglike seeds, the sticky stigma and that micro- 

 scopic pollen dust, we may see in some form or 

 other in every flowering plant that grows. 



The act that we might have performed to pro- 

 duce a new dianthus plant — the combination of 

 the pollen with some of those eggs is going on 

 about us always, everywhere — by the bees, the 

 butterflies, the birds, the winds, and numerous 

 other agencies acting to effect these combina- 

 tions. Which is the reason for the candy factory 

 at the bottom of every carnation's little central 

 well. And for those brilliant petals, and that 

 delicate fragrance and the arrangement of the 

 stamen stalks, and the crosswise poise of their 

 pollen-bearing anthers, and the central pistil 

 stalk which rises upward from the egg nest and 

 everything that is beautiful and lovely in the 

 bloom of that dianthus — and the dianthus itself. 



Here is a plant, the dianthus, so anxious to 

 produce variations in its offspring that it has lost 

 the power of fertilizing its own eggs and risked 

 its whole posterity upon the cooperation of in- 

 sects or other means for bringing pollen from 

 some neighboring plant. 



