337 
EECENT OBSEEVATIONS ON THE FEETILISATION 
OF PLANTS. 
By ALFEED W. BENNETT, M.A., B.Sc., F.L.S. 
Lecttieer on Botany, St. Thomas’s Hospital. 
[PLATE CII.] 
I 
I T is proposed in the following article to give an account of 
some of the most recent observations on the subject of the 
contrivances by which the Fertilisation of Flowers is effected ; 
a subject the details of which are so numerous and varied 
that the field of observation open, not only to the scientific 
botanist, but even to the ordinary observer, seems almost bound- 
less. So much has now been written on this subject that every- 
one who has followed it to any extent is aware that the greater 
number of flowers are cross-fertilised — though to this rule there 
are exceptions to which we shall allude presently — and that the 
mode in which this cross-fertilisation is usually effected is by the 
agency of insects. There are, however, a considerable number 
of flowers which are fertilised without the assistance of insects 
by means of the wind ; and as these present, as a class, peculiar 
features of their own, we may spend a little time in the first 
place in considering them. 
A very good and familiar example of flowers fertilised by the 
agency of the wind is furnished by the common hazel, which 
flowers from January till the early part of March, even when 
the weather is very cold, and when there are scarcely any insects 
on the wing. The flowers of the hazel are of two kinds, male 
and female. The male flowers constitute the familiar catkins, 
which drop off and disappear before the leaves make their 
appearance. The catkins are generally in bunches of from two 
to four, every catkin containing on an average perhaps from 
100 to 120 flowers. Each of these male flowers consists of a 
simple scale-like bract enclosing from eight to twelve anthers, 
each of which discharges, when ripe, a cloud of innumerable 
pollen-grains ; so that the number of these grains in any single 
catkin must be prodigious. The female flowers are found on 
VOL. XII. — NO. XLIX. Z 
