hawkster’s voice. But the really important parts of the flower 
are the stamens and the pistils. And these again are as diversi- 
fied in form and color as their owners. 
The mature stamens are usually made up of two little sacks 
of golden orange dust, from which the contents are blown by the 
winds to other plants, or carried by insects from flower to flower 
in order that seeds may have fathers and mothers not too closely 
kin, and that the different character rudiments may mix, per- 
chance to give rise to offspring with new and yet untried com- 
binations of characters — perchance to give rise to still more 
adaptable and progressive offspring. 
While pollen to the unaided human eye appears as mealy 
flour or oily dust, a microscope brings forth great surprises. All 
sorts of fantastic shapes appear upon magnification— sculptured , 
smooth, grooved, covered with horny protuberances, or even with 
thorns, varying greatly in size, sometimes bound together in sets 
of four as in some heathers and the bearberry, or with long 
bonnet streamers as in the willow-herb and evening primroses. 
In some of the water plants the pollen grains remind one of tiny 
submarines. Many of these structures are helpful, while others 
may be a positive hindrance, just as some of our own organs 
appear to be, the appendix for example. A few kinds of pollen 
are water resistant, but most sorts easily spoil if wetted— often 
swelling till they burst like a toy balloon. In a former leaflet 
(The Crossing of Flowers) illustrations and descriptions of pollen 
grains, fertilization, and pistils are given. 
The mother element of a flower is the pistil, usually placed 
like a tall graceful vase or a set of them, in the centre of the 
flower, with a sticky, sugary mouth, and a flask-like hollow base 
full of ovules or tiny transparent seed cases, each containing a 
plant egg. 
The pollen, as contrasted with the ovules, is not well pro- 
tected, but it generally balances this by being very plentiful— so 
plentiful in fact that when the pine and spruce woods are in 
bloom the wind often deluges a nearby town in “sulphur 
showers”; —so plentiful that much of the cannel coal, as well as 
some other kinds of coal, are made up largely of trillions upon 
trillions of carbonized, crushed pollen grains. 
Flowers do, however, have all sorts of devices for protecting 
their pollen from the wet, however generous and careless they 
seem to be with it. In countries such as Australia and parts of 
Africa, with a dry and a rainy season, the great blooming period 
comes at the close of the latter. Hence, such plants as the 
acacias, wattles and other plants of the “scrub” or “bush” need 
no special devices. In spring-shower and mountainous regions 
where plants like the heathers, blueberries and campanulas 
abound, the flowers are bell-like and hang at angles sufficient to 
ward off the rain. In the moist rain belts of tropical regions 
plants such as the banana and its relatives have show-y, bright 
colored sheaths which protect the flower until after pollination, 
4 
