1 66 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
working it up ; turning their leaves where they can 
best get light (and in this it is chiefly the violet sun- 
waves that help them), growing, even at night, by 
making new cells out of the food they have taken in 
the day ; storing up for the winter ; putting out their 
flowers and making their seeds, and all the while 
smiling so pleasantly in quiet nooks and sunny dells 
that it makes us glad to see them. 
But why should the primroses have such golden 
crowns ? plain green ones would protect the seed quite 
as well. Ah ! now we come to a secret well worth 
knowing. Look at the two primrose flowers, I and 2, 
Fig. 43, p. 163, and tell me how you think the dust gets 
on to the top of the sticky knob or stigma. No. 2 
seems easy enough to explain, for it looks as if the 
pollen could fall down easily from the stamens on to 
the knob, but it cannot fall up, as it would have to do 
in No. I. Now the curious truth is, as Mr. Darwin 
has shown, that neither of these flowers can get the 
dust easily for themselves, but of the two No. I has 
the least difficulty. 
Look at a withered primrose, and see how it holds 
its head down, and' after a little while the yellow 
crown falls off. It is just about as it is falling that 
the anthers or bags of the stamens burst open, and 
then, in No. I (Fig. 44), they are dragged over the 
knob and some of the grains stick there. But in the 
other form of primrose, No. 2, when the flower falls off, 
the stamens do not come near the knob, so it has no 
chance of getting any pollen ; and while the primrose 
is upright the tube is so narrow that the dust does not 
easily fall. But, as I have said, neither kind gets it 
