156 Flowers and their Pedigrees, 



of the lilies and rushes. But their minute blossoms 

 are closely crowded together in globular heads, the 

 stamens and pistils being here divided in separate 

 flowers, though both kinds of flowers are combined in 

 each head. From an ancestral form not unlike this, 

 but still more like the wood rushes, we must get both 

 our sedges and our grasses. And though the sedges 

 themselves do not stand in the direct line of descent 

 to wheat and the other cereals, they are yet so valuable 

 as an illustration from their points of analogy and of 

 difference that we must turn aside for a moment to 

 examine the gradual course of their evolution. 



The simplest and most primitive sedges now 

 surviving, though very degenerate in type, yet retain 

 some distinct traces of their derivation from earlier 

 rush-like and lily-like ancestors. In the earliest exist- 

 ing type, known as scirpus, the calyx and petals which 

 were brightly coloured in the lilies, and which were 

 reduced to six brown scales in the rushes, have under- 

 gone a further degradation to the form of six small 

 dry bristles, which now merely remain as rudimentary 

 relics of a once useful and beautiful structure. In 

 some species of scirpus, too, the number of these 

 bristles is reduced from six to four or three. There 

 is still one whorl of three stamens, however ; but the 

 second whorl has disappeared ; while the pistil now 



