Did you ever stop to think how extremely convenient it is to have two parents? Mama stays at home and takes care of the little children, reads and sings to them, tells them stories, puts them to bed, spanks them when they are naughty and kisses them when they are good. Indeed, you couldn’t get on very well without Mama. Neither could you get on very well without Daddy. Daddy doesn’t seem so important as Mama; but if Daddy didn’t go to work every day, and earn money for Mama and their little boys and girls, where would house and food and clothes and birthday parties and music lessons all come from?

Suppose there were no Mamas at all, but only just Daddies. Then of course there would be no aunties, nor nurses nor cooks nor big sisters nor kind ladies in the next house. There would be only just men; and half the men would have to stay home from the office to take care of the little boys of the other half, and then their work wouldn’t get done, and there would be no end of trouble.

It would be almost worse if there were only Mamas and no Daddies. For then all the Mamas would have to go out to work; and even when they could earn enough to hire a nurse, which I am afraid would not be often, the best of nurses isn’t like Mama. So it is really much better as it is, when we have both fathers and mothers, one to work abroad, and the other to work at home and take care of the children.

In fact, this arrangement is so much better than any other that pretty much all the living world has adopted it. You know the ears of corn which we buy in August and September and eat off the cob. You know too how it comes from the shop, all wrapped up in soft green husks, with the long silk hanging out of the end, that little girls in the country use for dolls’ hair, and ridiculous little boys try to smoke in pipes. The ear is the mother corn, and the kernels wrapped snugly away in the green husk are her children. Or rather they are her eggs, with the little corn plants inside, almost ready to be dried over winter and be planted and start life for themselves. Each kernel of corn has one fibre of silk, which is joined to it at one end and hanging out of the ear at the other.

[ The cob is the mother of the corn. Its father is the tassel. ]

The ear, then, is the mother of the corn. Its father is the tassel at the top of the stalk. From each branch of the tassel hang many tiny brown bags, each about as large as a grain of rice, and each filled with a very fine brown dust. This dust is called pollen. And unless a grain of this pollen falls on each thread of silk of each ear, then the kernel at the other end of the thread will never grow to full size and never become a seed; but will always remain small like the undersized kernels at the end of the ear. If the tassel is cut off; or the silk pulled out; or the ear tied up in a paper bag, then the ear forms no proper seed.

Sometimes, on an ear of sweet corn, one finds a few kernels, or a single kernel only, that instead of being white like the rest, is yellow. This means that somewhere in the neighborhood, it may be miles away, somebody has planted a field of common yellow corn, which we make into corn meal, but do not eat off the cob because it isn’t sweet. A grain or two of pollen from this yellow corn has been carried by the wind and fallen on the silk of an ear of sweet corn. So the father of that particular kernel is yellow and its mother white, and the kernel is colored just as if a white woman had married a Negro or an Indian.

Different plants manage these things differently. The ancient Egyptians, who lived on dates much as we live on corn and wheat, used to plant orchards of date palms as we plant orchards of our fruits. Every year, at the time when the cultivated date trees were in blossom, the Egyptian farmers used to go out into the desert, cut branches from certain wild palms which never bore fruit, and carry them in procession thru their date orchards. They did not know why they did this. They only knew that if they omitted the ceremony for a single year, that year they got no fruit. We know now, of course, that the date-bearing palm is the female tree; and the wild palm which doesn’t bear anything is the male. The procession with branches thru the orchards simply brought in the pollen.

Most plants, on the other hand, not to take any chances, have seed and pollen in the same flower. Many too, instead of relying on accident and the wind to carry one to the other, are arranged so that insects and humming-birds, in seeking food, shall make the transfer. Some, few, however, like the willows, have seed and pollen on separate trees.