The Daisy's Pedigree. 23 



look aside for a moment at the way in which they 

 have been produced, in order rightly to understand 

 the ancestry of the daisy. 



No pistil ever grows into a perfect fruit or sets ripe 

 and good seeds until it is fertilised by a grain of pollen 

 from a stamen of its own kind. In some plants the 

 pollen is simply allowed to fall from the stamens on 

 to the piotil of the same flower ; but plants thus self- 

 fertilised are not so strong or so hearty as those 

 which are cross-fertilised by the pollen of another. 

 The first system resembles in its bad effect the habit 

 of * breeding in and in ' among animals, or of too 

 close intermarriages among human beings ; while the 

 second system produces the same beneficial results as 

 those of cross-breeding, or the introduction of * fresh 

 blood ' in the animate world. Hence, any early 

 plants which happened to be so constituted as to 

 allow of easy cross-fertilisation would be certain to 

 secure stronger and better seedlings than their self- 

 fertilised neighbours ; and wherever any peculiar form 

 or habit has tended to encoura^je this mode of setting 

 seeds, the plants have always prospered and thriven 

 exceedingly in the struggle for existence with their 

 less fortunate congeners. A large number of flowers 

 have thus become specially adapted for fertilisation 

 by the wind, as we see in the case of catkins and 



