A NEW THEORY OF FLORAL STRUCTURE. 7 
us in the year that is past, and to whom we look for aid in the 
year to come. 
REVERENCE.* 
There is an inner voice in woods and hills 
Most sweet that it hath no articulate word ; 
The mystic chant of rivulet and bird 
With dreamlike longing all my spirit fills ; 
Great Nature with half-spoken mystery thrills ; 
And, were the spell with which the heart is stirred 
Laid rudely bare, the voice were no more heard 
Ringing from all the mountains, woods, and rills. 
And Thou, O God ! before whose burning throne 
With folded wings the Seraph veils his face, 
I ask not, foolish-hearted, to be shown 
The vast dread secrets of Thy dwelling-place, 
But rather, filled with reverent awe, would bend 
Before a God I may not comprehend. 
W. Walsham Wakefield. 
A NEW THEORY OF FLORAL STRUCTURE. 
N my last communication to Nature NoTEsf I showed 
how the leaves of plants can become profoundly altered 
by a change of environment ; and that such alterations 
of structure they, as well as stems and roots, undergo, 
are due to the responsive power of the living protoplasm to the 
direct action of the environment upon those organs. 
In the present paper I propose to consider a theoretical 
Origin of Flowers by the aid of insects and other agencies. 
So much has been written about the fertilisation of flowers 
that I will presume the reader to know what is meant by the 
process of placing the pollen from the anther upon the stigma of 
the pistil to secure the fertilisation of the ovule and its subsequent 
conversion into a seed. 
Nature secures this by three different ways. Some flowers, 
like the Spotted Orchis, require the visits of insects or the pollen 
can never escape at all. In others, as the Stinging Nettle and 
Fir trees, the wind blows the pollen from one plant to another. 
In the majority of cases flowers are capable of setting their own 
seed, as the stamens and pistils are in the same flower ; and 
though many such are nevertheless adapted to insects conveying 
the pollen from one flower to another, yet they can with com- 
paratively few exceptions sooner or later succeed in fertilising 
themselves. In a large number of instances flowers are never 
* Reprinted from the Spectator by kind permission of the Lord Bishop of 
Wakefield. 
f The Influence of the Environment upon Hants, vol. I, p. 169. 
