Author of "Highways and Byways," "Sharp Eyes," etc.
PUZZLING FORMS AND FACES.
Indeed, are they not all riddles? Where is the flower which even to the most devoted of us has yet confided all its mysteries? In comparison with the insight of the earlier botanists, we have surely come much closer to the flowers, and they have imparted many of their secrets to us. Through the inspired vision of Sprengel, Darwin, and their followers, we have learned something of their meaning, in addition to the knowledge of their structure, which comprised the end and aim of the study of those early scholars, Linnæus, Lindley, Jassieu, and De Candolle. To these and other eminent worthies in botany we owe much of our knowledge of how the flowers are made, and of the classification based upon this structure, but if these great savants had been asked, "You have shown us that it is so, but why is it thus?" they could only have replied, "We know not; we only know that an all-wise Providence has so ordained and created it."
Take this little collection, which I have here presented, of stamens and petals selected at random from common blossoms. What inexplicable riddles to the botanist of a hundred years ago, even of sixty years ago! For not until that time was their significance fully understood; and yet each of these presents but one of several equally puzzling features in the same flowers from which they were taken.
FERTILIZATION OF A FLOWER AS BELIEVED BY GREW AND LINNÆUS.
In that first anther, for example, why those pores at the tip of the cells, instead of the usual slits at the sides, and why that pair of horns at the back? And the next one, with longer tubes, and the same two horns besides! Then there is that queer specimen with flapping ears—one of six from the barberry blossom; and the pointed, arrow-headed individual with a long plume from its apex; and the curved C-shaped specimen—one of a pair of twins which hide beneath the hood of the sage blossom. The lily anther, which comes last, is poised in the centre. Why? What puzzles to the mere botanist! for it is because these eminent scholars were mere botanists—students and chroniclers of the structural facts of flowers—that this revelation of the truth about these blossom features was withheld from them. It was not until they had become philosophers and true seers, not until they sought the divine significance, the reason, which lay behind or beneath these facts, that the flowers disclosed their mysteries to them.
Look at that random row of petals too!—one with a peacock's eye, two others with dark spots, and next the queer-fingered petal of the mignonette, followed by one of that queer couple of the monk's-hood blossom which no one ever sees unless he tears the flower hood to pieces. We all know the nasturtium, but have we thought to ask it why these petals have such a deep crimson or orange colored spot, and why each one is so beautifully fringed at the edge of its stalk?
