Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/687

Rh us by the lilies themselves, and travel down the other line of degeneracy and degradation which leads us on to the grasses and the cereals, including at last our own familiar cultivated wheat. Any trinary flower with three calyx-pieces, three petals, six stamens, and a three celled pistil not concealed within an inclosing tube, is said to be a lily, as long as it possesses brightly colored and delicate petals. There are, however, a large number of somewhat specialized lilies with very small and inconspicuous petals, which have been artificially separated by botanists as the rush family, not because they were really different in any important point of structure from the acknowledged lilies, but merely because they had not got such brilliant and handsome blossoms. These despised and neglected plants, however, supply us with the first downward step on the path of degeneracy which leads at last to the grasses, and they may be considered as intermediate stages in the scale of degradation, fortunately preserved for us by exceptional circumstances to the present day. Even among the true lilies, there are some, like the garlic and onion tribe, which show considerable marks of degeneration, owing to some decline from the type of insect fertilization to the undesirable habit of fertilizing themselves. Thus, while our common English rampsons or wild garlic has pretty and conspicuous white blossoms, some other members of the tribe, such as the crow allium, have very small greenish flowers, often reduced to mere shapeless bulbs. Among the true rushes, however, the course of development has been somewhat different. These water-weeds have acquired the habit of trusting for fertilization to the wind, which carries the pollen of one blossom to the sensitive surface of another, perhaps at less trouble and expense to the parent plant than would be necessary for the allurement of bees or flies by all the bribes of brilliant petals and honeyed secretions. To effect this object, their stamens hang out pensile to the breeze, on long, slender filaments, so lightly poised that the merest breath of air amply suffices to dislodge the pollen: while the sensitive surface of the ovaries is prolonged into a branched and feathery process, seen under the microscope to be studded with adhesive glandular knobs, which readily catch and retain every golden grain of the fertilizing powder which may chance to be wafted toward them on the wings of the wind. Under such circumstances, the rush kind could only lose by possessing brightly colored and attractive petals, which would induce insects uselessly to plunder their precious stores: and so all those rushes which showed any tendency in that direction would soon be weeded out by natural selection; while those which produced only dry and inconspicuous petals would become the parents of future generations, and would hand on their own peculiarities to their descendants after them. Thus the existing: rushes are all plain little lilies with dry, brownish flowers, specially adapted to wind-fertilization alone.

Among the rushes themselves, again, there are various levels of