Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/686

 ovary. Among familiar exotics of the same family may be mentioned the hyacinth, tuberose, tulip, asphodel, yucca, and most of the so-called lilies. In short, no tribe supplies us with a greater number of handsome garden flowers, for the most part highly adapted to a very advanced type of insect fertilization.

Properly to understand the development of our existing wheat from this brilliant and ornamental family, as well as to realize the true nature of its relation to allied orders, we must first glance briefly at the upward evolution of the other branches descended from the true lilies, and then recur to the downward evolution which finally resulted in the production of the degenerate grasses. In the main line of progressive development, the lilies gave origin to the amaryllids, familiarly represented in England by the snow-drops and daffodils, a family which is technically described as differing from the lilies in having an inferior instead of a superior ovary—that is to say, with the pistil apparently placed below instead of above the point where the petals and calyx-pieces are inserted. From the evolutionary point of view, however, this difference merely amounts to saying that the amaryllids are tubular lilies, in which the tube has coalesced with the walls of the ovary, so that the petals seem to begin at its summit instead of at its base. The change gives still greater certainty of impregnation, and therefore benefits the race accordingly. At the same time, the amaryllids, being probably a much newer development than the true lilies, have not yet had leisure to gain quite so firm a footing in the world; though on the other hand many of them are far more minutely adapted for special insect fertilization than their earlier allies. They include the so-called Guernsey lilies of our gardens, as well as the huge American aloes which all visitors to the Riviera know so well on the dry hills around Nice and Cannes. The iris family are a similar but rather more advanced tribe, with only three stamens instead of six, their superior organization allowing them readily to dispense with half their complement, and so to attain the perfect trinary symmetry of three sepals, three petals, three stamens, and three ovaries. Among them, the iris and the crocus are circular in shape, but some very advanced types, such as the gladiolus, have acquired a bilateral form, in correlation with special insect visits. From these, the step is not great to the orchids, undoubtedly the highest of all the trinary flowers, with the triple arrangement almost entirely obscured, and with the most extraordinary varieties of adaptation to fertilization by bees or even by humming-birds in the most marvelous fashions. Alike by their inferior ovary, their bilateral shape, their single stamen, their remarkable forms, their brilliant colors, and their occasional mimicry of insect-life, the orchids show themselves to be by far the highest of the trinary flowers, if not, indeed, of the entire vegetable world.

From this brief sketch of the main line of upward evolution from lilies to orchids, we must now return to the grand junction afforded