To make a perfect seed the stamen and pistil have to enter into partnership. The stamen sends out thousands of clear orange pollen grains (Fig. 3, b), and when these fall on the top of the lily or pistil, as some have done in. Fig. 2, they stick fast. The lily, for all its innocent look, has laid a trap for them; it is covered with a sticky substance that holds them fast. The tiny little grain begins to send out a tube like a little hose-pipe, which grows down and down to the bottom of the lily. There it finds some very small egg-shaped bodies called ovules (Fig. 2, o). The busy little hose-pipe pushes its way into a little opening at the end of one of the ovules, pumps away till the pollen grain is empty, and the liquid out of it is all safely stored in the ovule, and then it withers away. The ovule when it is ripe is a seed, but if the pollen has not emptied itself in the way just described, the ovule dies.
If you look at Fig. 4 you will see the pistil of a pansy, or heart's-ease. No. 1 is a side view of the pistil sliced down so you can see into it, as you can into a baby-house. You see the pollen grains, b, sending down their tubes to the ovules, o. No. 2 in this drawing is the front view of the heart's-ease pistil. The beautiful colored leaves of a flower are only meant to cover and protect the pistil and the pollen of the plant, as the fruit is meant to cover its seed. There has been a tender care for us in all this that the covering for both should have been made so beautiful and so delicious.
THE TALKING LEAVES.[2]
An Indian Story.
BY W. O. STODDARD.
Chapter XIX.
ortune had been hard upon Bill and his two mates, or at least they thought so. The trees to which they had been tied by the Lipans were so situated that it was only necessary for them to turn their heads in order to have a good view of what was doing on the plain to the westward. They saw their captors ride out, and heard their whoops and yells of self-confidence and defiance.