Cuckoo- Pint, 251 



pistil-bearing flowers in the cuckoo-pint, the ^Ethio- 

 pian lily has several small blossoms intermediate 

 between the perfect flowers of the acorus, or the half- 

 perfect flowers of the marsh calla, and the very im- 

 perfect flowers of the arum ; for each of them has 

 here a central green knob or capsule, surrounded 

 irregularly by four or five stamens, but without any 

 petals, or even any scales to represent them. These 

 form the green bodies which I have already described 

 as apparently embedded in a hard yellow matrix ; and 

 that yellow matrix is composed of the stamens. The 

 lower part of the ^Ethiopian lily, in fact, consists of 

 irregular flowers which, like those of the marsh calla, 

 have quite lost their petals, but which still retain an 

 indefinite number of stamens grouped around a single 

 pistil ; while in the upper part, as in the central group 

 of the arum, the pistils have disappeared also, and 

 only the stamens remain. Such a plant as this lily, 

 then, is clearly on the way to becoming what the 

 arum has actually become : its flowers already show 

 a tendency toward the unisexual condition. In the 

 upper portion they have all become actually unisexual, 

 for there we get nothing but stamens ; in the lower 

 part they remain irregularly bisexual, for there, though 

 the stamens are often reduced in number — nature los- 

 ing count again — some of them still remain embedded 



