3 o8 CHAPTERS ON EVOLUTION. 



XIV. 

 THE FERTILISATION OF FLOWERS. 



FEW subjects, if any, are better calculated to awaken a lively interest 

 in the investigation of natural laws and the phenomena of life at 

 large, than the study of those processes of development whereby 

 the races of animals and plants retain their hold upon the world, 

 and maintain a continuous and unbroken round and cycle of exist- 

 ence. In such studies, more than in any others, we seem to gain 

 near glimpses of Nature's ways and methods in fashioning the varied 

 universe of living beings ; whilst the lessons such topics are well 

 calculated to enforce respecting the order of nature as a whole, form 

 not the least important result of these investigations. The study of 

 even the most commonplace object may, under the newer phases of 

 research, be made to yield an amount of " sweetness and light " for 

 which we might be wholly unprepared. The day of the Peter Bells, 

 and of uninquiring moods and tenses, if not altogether a thing of the 

 past, is happily already in its twilight stage. The schoolboy, with a 

 primer of botany in hand, understands things at which the previous 

 generation simply wondered. And even if the results of botanical 

 study may occasionally be expressed by the hackneyed Words- 

 worthian idea of thoughts beyond tears, the modern student of 

 plant-life has ample reason to congratulate himself on having attained 

 the mastery of many ideas, which in past years were included under 

 the poetic category of " expressive silence." The primrose still grows 

 by the " river's brim," in truth, but it is no longer merely a yellow prim- 

 rose. On the contrary, the flower is in greater part understood, the 

 mechanism of its life is well-nigh completely within our mental grasp ; 

 and, best of all, its study has led in the past, as it leads even now, to 

 the comprehension of wider ideas of nature, and more extensive 

 views of plant life, than those which formerly met the gaze of the 

 wayfarer in scientific pastures. The appreciation of what is involved 

 in part of the life-history of a primrose may thus serve as a starting- 

 point- for more extensive research into the phenomena of plant- 

 fertilisation at large ; and this latter topic, in its turn, falls naturally 

 into its proper niche in teaching us plain lessons respecting the 

 manner in which the wide domain of life is regulated and governed. 

 By the " fertilisation " of a plant is meant to be indicated those 

 actions or processes in virtue of which those little bodies named 



