NEWS OF SPRING 



flowers, in which the grooms and brides are born, love and 

 die in the same corolla. The characteristics of the system are 

 well enough known: the stamens, or male organs, generally 

 frail and numerous, are grouped around the robust and pa- 

 tient pistil. As the great Linnaeus so delightfully says, 

 ^'Mariti et uxores uno eodemque thalamo gaudentf' But the 

 distribution, the form, the habits of these organs vary in every 

 flower, as though nature had a thought that cannot yet be- 

 come settled, or an imagination that makes it a point of hon- 

 our never to repeat itself. Often the pollen, when ripe, falls 

 quite naturally from the top of the stamens upon the pistil; 

 but very often, also, pistil and stamens are of the same height, 

 or the latter are too far away, or the pistil is twice as tall as 

 they. Then come endless efforts to succeed in meeting. 

 Sometimes, as in the Nettle, the stamens crouch upon their 

 stalk at the bottom of the corolla : at the moment of fertiliza- 

 tion, the stalk straightens out like a spring; and the anther, 

 or pollen mass, that tops it shoots a cloud of dust over the 

 stigma. Sometimes, as in the Barberry, whose nuptials can 

 be accomplished only in the bright hours of a cloudless day, 

 the stamens, far removed from the pistil, are kept against 

 the sides of the flower by the weight of their moist glands: 



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