MICROSCOPIC GARDENING. 



11 



be grown in water until all the reserves are used up : it puts out 

 its pollen-tube exactly as it does when planted by a bee or by 

 the hand of a horticulturist on its natural bed — the sugar-laden 

 stigma — and years of patient research have shown that as this 

 pollen- tube grows down the style into the ovary of a flower, it 

 does the same : growing at the expense of the sugary juices 

 offered it by the style it succeeds in growing long enough to 

 carry its contents to the ovules— the future seeds — and we know 

 what important effects follow according as we sow good or bad 

 pollen, that from choice varieties or that from the wrong flowers. 

 Hence the whole art of fertilising and hybridising flowers really 

 consists in microscopic gardening. 



If this required further proof than I have given, nothing is 

 more conclusive to my mind than certain results obtained a few 

 years ago by the Russian observer Woronin. He found that in 

 many bilberries the fruits, though apparently formed normally, 

 shrivelled up as they ripen to a black mass full of a fungus. On 

 tracing the life- history of this fungus it turned out that its 

 spores — i.e. what correspond to seeds — have a faint violet odour 

 which attracts insects, and some of the spores are carried by the 

 insects to the stigma of the bilberry and there sown, mixed with 

 pollen brought by other insects, or by the same, from bilberry 

 flowers. 



Now, the fascinating point in this history is that we have 

 here clearly a case of microscopic gardening where the prepared 

 bed — the stigma — receives its normal sowing of pollen, together 

 with a greater or less proportion of weed-spores, and the latter 

 justify their name inasmuch as they, like true weeds, grow so 

 much more quickly and vigorously that they soon occupy the 

 whole area, and, growing down the style, reach the young ovules 

 and devour them, and convert the whole fruit into a mummy 

 filled with fungus. 



The following is a still more extraordinary case of micro- 

 scopic gardening, with so much appearance of purpose in it 

 that one would be justified in hesitating to accept the details 

 were they not vouched for by such excellent observers, and worked 

 out in such detail by competent men. 



Bates in 1863, in his travels on the Amazon, was struck like 

 other observers by the enormous numbers of leaf-cutting ants, 

 which cut bits out of the leaves of all sorts of trees and carry 



