Cuckoo-Pint. 241 



will remember that a true lily is made upof six bril- 

 liant petals or flower-leaves, inclosing six long pendul- 

 ous stamens, and with a seed-vessel or ovary of three 

 cells in the very centre. Such a blossom as that we 

 call a perfect flower, because it possesses within itself 

 all the component elements of any blossom — calyx, 

 petals, stamens, and pistil. Moreover, it is, so to 

 speak, a self-contained and self-sufficing flower ; it 

 has bright petals to entice an insect fertiliser, pollen 

 to impregnate its ovary, and embryo seeds to form the 

 future ripe fruit. But as we have so often noticed, it 

 is highly undesirable for a flower to be fertilised with 

 pollen from its own stamens : those plants which are 

 impregnated from the stamens of their neighbours 

 always produce more seed and stronger seedlings than 

 those which are impregnated with home-made pollen 

 from their own sacs. Hence, cross-fertilisation, we 

 know, is the great end aimed at by all flowers ; and 

 those plants which happen to vary in any direction 

 favourable to cross fertilisation invariably succeed best 

 in the struggle for life, while those which happen to 

 vary in any direction hostile to it, or which acquire 

 the bad habit of self-fertilisation, tend slowly to go to 

 the wall, and to die out from inherited and ever- 

 increasing feebleness of constitution. 



There can be very little doubt that the ancestors 



