PRACTICAL POLLENATION 



So it is not strange that a plant that is 

 thus perennially threatened with destruction 

 should adopt exceptional measures to ensure the 

 fertilization of its flowers. 



Very often it may have happened that certain 

 individual flowers that chanced to be self -fertilized 

 were instrumental in saving the life of a species 

 that otherwise would have been exterminated. 

 And as, through the operation of heredity, 

 the offspring of these flowers would tend to 

 reproduce the self-fertilizing habit of their parent, 

 the surviving representatives of the species might 

 thus come to constitute a tribe in which the 

 habit of bearing self-fertilized flowers was the 

 prevailing custom. 



And thus it is, perhaps, that the method of 

 reproduction followed by the wheat in our fields 

 and the peas and beans in our gardens may be 

 accounted for. 



Yet the fact that certain of these self-fertilized 

 flowers, as for example the violet, retain the 

 custom of putting forth showy flowers even though 

 these for the most part are seedless, shows how 

 powerful is the hold of remoter heredity, and 

 how persistently the plant clings to a custom to 

 which its ancestors owed their racial development. 

 Moreover, it has been observed that the violet, 

 when transplanted to a sunny spot and made 



[77] 



