Plants and their children

by Frances Theodora Parsons

This picture (Fig. [184]) shows you the pistil of the lily. At the foot of this pistil, you remember, is the box which holds the lily’s seeds.

The top of the lily’s pistil is quite large and somewhat flat. It is almost as sticky as if it had received a dab of glue.

This flat top dwindles below into a stalk, which grows larger again at its lower end.

Now take a sharp knife and cut open lengthwise this pistil.

The lower, thicker part, seen through a magnifying glass, looks like Fig. [185]. You see a great many baby seeds fastened to a central wall. Each one of these seeds holds a speck of the wonderful material without which there is no life. But this speck of life has not the power to make the seed grow into a plant. To do this, the seed must have some outside help; and this help can come only from a grain of flower dust.

Fig. 185

Perhaps you wonder how a dust grain brushed on the pistil’s flat top can ever reach the baby seeds hidden away in the seedbox.

I could not tell you to-day how this is done were it not for those wise and patient men and women who have spent days and weeks and months, and even years, in watching and studying the ways of plants.

But first let me ask you a question.