Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/296

 266 rapid combination of oxygen gas with the carbon of the plant; an hypothesis hardly adequate to explain either.

Nectarium, the Nectary, may be defined as that part of the Corolla which contains or which secretes honey. It is perhaps in effect nearly universal, as hardly a flower can be found that has not more or less honey, though that liquor is far from being universally, or even generally, formed by any apparatus separate from the Petals. In monopetalous flowers, as Lamium album the Dead Nettle, t. 768, the tube of the corolla contains, and probably secretes, the honey, without any evident Nectary. Sometimes the part under consideration is a production or elongation of the Corolla, as in Violets; sometimes indeed of the Calyx, as in the Garden Nasturtium, Tropæolum, Curt. Mag. t. 23 and 98, whose coloured Calyx partakes much of the nature of the petals. Sometimes it is distinct from both, either resembling the petals, as in Aquilegia, ''Engl. Bot. t. 297, or more different, as in Epimedium, t. 438, Helleborus, t. 200 and 613, Aconitum, the Common Monkshood, and Delphinium'', the Larkspur. Such at