Fig. 177
I hope that you children, from now on, will be unwilling to pass by a flower without looking to see whether its stamens are few or many; and I hope you will try to carry away in your minds a clear idea of the size and shape of their dust boxes.
FLOWER DUST, OR POLLEN
When a child smells a flower, he is apt to put his nose right into the middle of the blossom, and to take it out with a dab of yellow dust upon its tip.
When he brushes off this dust, of course he does not stop to think that each tiny grain holds a speck of the wonderful material we read about some time ago, the material without which there can be no life.
And probably he does not know that the dust grains from the lily are quite unlike those which he rubs upon his nose when he smells a daisy; that different kinds of flowers yield different kinds of flower dust.
If you should look through a microscope at a grain of flower dust from the lily, you would see an object resembling Fig. [178].
| Fig. 178 | Fig. 179 | Fig. 180 | Fig. 181 | Fig. 182 |
Fig. [179] shows a grain from the pretty blue flower of the chicory. Fig. [180] is a dust grain from the flower of the pine tree. Fig. [181] is from the laurel, and the odd-looking Fig. [182] is from a dust box of the evening primrose.