152 Flowers aiid their Pedigrees. 



of insect fertilisation to the undesirable habit of 

 fertilising themselves. Thus, while our common 

 English rampsons or wild garlic has pretty and con- 

 spicuous white blossoms, some other members of the 

 tribe, such as the crow allium, have very small 

 greenish flowers, often reduced to mere shapeless 

 bulbs. Among the true rushes, however, the course 

 of development has been somewhat different. These 

 water-weeds have acquired the habit of trusting for 

 fertilisation to the wind, which carries the pollen of 

 one blossom to the sensitive surface of another, per- 

 haps at less trouble and expense to the parent plant 

 than would be necessary for the allurement of bees 

 or flies by all the bribes of brilliant petals and 

 honeyed secretions. To effect this object, their 

 stamens hang out pensile to the breeze, on long 

 slender filaments, 50 lightly poised that the merest 

 breath of air amply suffices to dislodge the pollen : 

 whib the sensitive surface of the ovaries is prolonged 

 into a branched and feathery process, seen under the 

 microscope to be studded with adhesive glandular 

 knobs, which readily catch and retain every golden 

 grain of the fertilising pow^der which may chance to 

 be wafted toward them on the wings of the wind. 

 Under such circumstances, the rush kind could only 

 lose by possessing brightly coloured and attractive 



