When the staminate cones are mature, only a very gentle 
motion serves to shake out the pollen, which is then borne on the 
breeze to the egg-bearing cones, where it finally lodges in such a 
position that the sperms within may finally reach the egg, and 
fertilize it. The depositing of the pollen on the proper part of 
the egg-bearing cone is pollination. 
In the climate of New York the pollination of pines usually 
takes place about the middle of May, but this is an unusually 
earl} 7 spring, and the shedding of pine pollen is now in progress, 
and may be observed in several places in the Garden, or in 
Prospect Park, across the street. 
If one gently shakes a limb of a pine tree bearing mature 
staminate cones, the pollen will be shaken out in large quanti- 
ties, and will float away through the air as a fine cloud. The 
writer once exposed a photographic negative in front of a tree 
which had just been vigorously shaken, and the mass of pollen 
that resulted made the negative look as if it were “fogged.” 
In the photographic print the pollen cloud showed very dis- 
tinctly. 
Of course this method of pollination is very wasteful of 
pollen, for most of the grains do not lodge in the proper place to 
accomplish pollination. On this account, vast quantities of 
pollen must be produced, and during the season of pollination 
the air is laden with pollen grains. The w r riter once found a thin 
deposit of pine pollen inside a closed drawer, in a botanical 
laboratory. The drawer had not been opened during the period 
of the shedding of the pollen, but the windows of the laboratory 
had been open, and the pollen had been wafted in through the 
windows from nearby pine trees, and carried by the wind into 
every crack and crevice. 
The following paragraph from The First Book of Far?ni?ig, by 
Goodrich, illustrates the great abundance of pollen shed by wind- 
pollinated ( aiiemophyllous ) plants, and also emphasizes what a 
very wasteful process this is: 
“You have sometimes noticed in the spring that after a rain 
the pools of water are surrounded by a ring of yellow pow T der, 
and you have perhaps thought it was sulphur. It was not 
sulphur, but was composed of millions of pollen grains from 
flowers. One spring Sunday I laid my hat on the seat in church. 
When I picked it up at the end of the service, I found consid- 
erable dust on it. I brushed the dust off, but on reaching home 
I found some remaining, and noticed that it was yellow, so I 
examined it with a magnifying glass and found that it was nearly 
all pollen grains. Then I rubbed my fingers across a shelf in my 
room and found it slightly dusty; the magnifying glass showed 
me that this dust was half pollen. This shows what a great 
amount of pollen is produced and discharged into the air, and 
it shows that very few pistils could escape even if they were 
under cover of a building.” 
