THE COMMON MALLOW— continued. 
is secreted in little pockets in the receptacle at the base of the petals, covered with 
hairs that serve to exclude rain and very short-tongued insects ; and, as in Althcea , 
the five staminal groups, before uniting with one another, are so united to the petals 
as to make these appear gamopetalous. This species is markedly protandrous. 
When the flower first opens the stamens stand up as a cone in the centre over the 
as yet undeveloped styles. Having shed their pollen, they wilt and hang down- 
•wards, serving apparently as collecting hairs to receive pollen brought by insects 
from other flowers. The ring of styles then elongates and spreads outwards, 
occupying the original position of the anthers, whilst their inner surfaces become 
receptive. More than fifty species of insects have been recorded as visiting the 
flowers ; and, apparently, if they have failed to pollinate the stigmas directly, the 
styles bend over among the withered stamens and thus their stigmas come in 
contact with any pollen that may be clinging to them. 
The fruit forms a cushion-shaped ring of smooth carpels covered with a 
network of wrinkles and attached to an acutely conical axis with concave sides. 
There is a variety (var. lasiocarpa Druce) in which the carpels are hairy. Each carpel 
contains one curved ascending seed, the embryo of which is enclosed in a slightly 
mucilaginous albumen. This is insipid, though not unwholesome ; and, under the 
name of Cheeses, the fruits are great favourites with children, who thread them on 
strings, open them and eat the seeds. Thus John Clare writes of 
“The sitting down when school was o’er 
Upon the threshold of the door, 
Picking from mallows, sport to please, 
The crumpled seed we call a cheese.” 
Nor is it children only who find material for wonder in this symmetrical little 
structure. Lindley saw in it an example of the argument from design. 
“Only compare,” he says, in his “Ladies’ Botany,” “a vegetable cheese with all that is exquisite in marking and 
beautiful in arrangement in the works of man, and how poor and contemptible do the latter appear . . . Nor is it alone 
externally that this inimitable beauty is to be discovered ; cut the cheese across, and every slice brings to view cells and partitions, 
and seeds and embryos, arranged with an unvarying regularity, which would be past belief if we did not know from experience, 
how far beyond all that the mind can conceive, is the symmetry with which the works of Nature are constructed.” 
