THE COMMON CORSE— continued. 
a delicious perfume of apricots, especially when the sun is shining with its full heat, 
or when we crush the flowers in our hands ; and this advertisement of the pollen 
attracts a numerous crowd of bees. The claws of the petals are short, the wing petals 
are longer than those of the keel, and both these pairs are obtuse in front. The ten 
stamens are all united below ; but the two whorls differ in their anthers, which are 
alternately short and versatile and long and basifixed. 
Delpino and Hermann Mailer distinguished four main types of pollination- 
mechanism among Papilionatce, viz. (i) explosive flowers, in which only one insect’s 
visit has any effect in pollination ; (ii) the piston mechanism, which requires numerous 
insect visits, as in Ononis and Lotus; (iii) the brushing arrangement, not very 
dissimilar, as in Vida and Lathyrus ; and (iv) flowers in which both stamens and 
stigma emerge from the keel under the pressure of the bee upon the flower, but 
return to their former position when its weight is removed, so that repeated visits 
may prove efficacious. This last group includes Melilotus, Trifolium, and Astragalus. 
Genista and Ulex are examples of the first type. The anthers mature in succession, 
some of them in the bud stage, and all of them discharge their pollen into the space 
between the stigma and the anthers at the apex of the keel. Their filaments then 
shrivel up. 
The keel petals are at first united along both their upper and their lower 
margins and are, like the standard petal, nearly horizontal. This position is one of 
tension, the curved style pressing like a spring against the united upper edges of the 
keel petals. When a bee alights on the flower in search of pollen — for honey there is 
none — and thrusts its proboscis down the middle line of the standard petal to the 
base of the receptacular tube, the claws of the wing and keel petals curl backward, 
the keel petals separate along their upper edge, the pistil springs upward with a 
jerk, and the keel petals themselves fall downward and backward into a vertical 
position, throwing out a shower of pollen. 
The Common Gorse flowers from February to June and again from August to 
September ; but the fruit is mainly the product of the first flowering. The thick 
black pods, covered with brown hairs, are about three-quarters of an inch in length, 
but little longer, that is, than the calyx ; and on a warm summer’s day we can hear 
them explode on all sides of us as we walk over moor or common. In this way, we 
have known the seeds to be thrown fully twenty feet. 
The Gorse belongs essentially to West Central Europe, from Italy to the 
Canaries and the Azores and northward to Denmark. Even in the south of England 
it often suffers severely from the frost, while it is specially luxuriant on the hills of 
the west within reach of the sea-breezes. It may, in fact, be included in the list of 
the Atlantic or Lusitanian florula. 
