HOPS BLOSSOM. 171 



staminiferous blossoms are of small practical interest : 

 they consist simply of these inconspicuous little yellowish- 

 green panicles, hanging from the angles of the upper 

 leaves in this wild creeper, and looking very much like 

 their near relations the nettle flowers. Still, they keep 

 up something like the semblance of a floral pattern, 

 having each five small green sepals and five curved 

 stamens enclosed in their midst. The female flowers, 

 however, which grow at last into what we know as hops, 

 have become so degraded or so highly developed, which- 

 ever you choose to call it, that their true nature is now 

 hardly recognisable at all. Their little florets are closely 

 crowded together in globular heads, looking much like a 

 miniature green pine-cone ; and under each bract of the 

 cone two minute flowers are packed away carefully in a 

 corner, with their calyx reduced to a tiny protective 

 scale, and the rest of their architecture simplified down 

 to a single ovary enclosing one spirally coiled seed: It 

 is the central floral idea reduced to its simplest possible 

 factors. From the scales the sensitive surface protrudes 

 to catch the pollen blown to it in the wild state from the 

 male on its feathery arms ; and then the fertilised cone 

 begins to swell, and the bracts grow out into large inflated 

 cups, quite concealing the small seed-like fruit. Whether 

 their bitterness has been acquired as a deterrent to animal 

 enemies it would be hard to say : certainly, it has not 

 availed to protect them against man, who from time 

 immemorial has employed the hops to flavour the in- 

 sipid drink which he prepares from malted grain, ' in 

 quandam vini similitudinem corruptum,' as Tacitus puts 

 it, with naive southern contemptuousness for the barbaric 

 stimulant. Certainly, no other plant has been so little 



