Flowers 
their queens of beauty to flowers, and priests used them 
in church services, and the guests at convivial enter- 
tainments were always decorated with wreaths and 
garlands. 
To the botanist, however, such an apparently simple 
question as “What constitutes a flower?” raises 
abstruse and almost metaphysical controversies which 
are either intensely attractive or entirely abhorrent, 
according to his own particular personal magnetism or 
the botanical ways in which he has been brought up, 
It is perhaps the most difficult question in the whole 
great science of botany, and will undoubtedly be 
earnestly discussed in 2009 A.D. 
But there is a much more interesting and practical 
question, which is, how did flowers manage, when once 
formed, to vary and multiply into the exquisite forms 
and lovely colours in the world’s flora of to-day ? 
A flower may be compared to a foliage bud which 
has never elongated. The uppermost leaves have been 
modified to produce the egg cells or female germ cell ; 
the stamens bearing the pollen, of which the grains are 
sperm cells (male), are also modified leaves, and the 
petals and sepals are also in all probability modified 
leaf-like organs. 
It is quite likely that the petals of many flowers were 
stamens in a previous ancestry, but on the whole it 
seems most reasonable to assume that both petals 
and sepals are for the most part modified leaves, 
devotees of the flower and changed in appearance 
accordingly.* 
* The carpels or egg cell leaves are greatly altered in form but often remain 
green. A pea pod is a typical carpel; wallflower has two carpels; lilies 
have three carpels; geraniums have five carpels; buttercup has many free 
carpels arranged spirally and is nearer the primitive type. The ovule or 
young seed which contains the egg cell is supposed by Worsdell? to be a three- 
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