Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/688

670 retrogressive development—retrogressive, that is to say, if we regard the lily family as an absolute standard: for the various alterations undergone by the different flowers are themselves adaptive to their new condition, though that condition is itself decidedly lower than the one from which they started. The common rush and its immediate congeners resemble the lilies from which they spring in having several seeds in each of the three cells which compose their pistil. But there is an interesting group of small grass-like plants, known as wood-rushes, which combine all the technical characteristics of the true rushes with a general character extremely like that of the grasses. They have long, thin, grass-like blades in the place of leaves; and, what is still more important, as indicating an approach to the essentially one-seeded grass tribe, they have only three seeds in the flower, one to each cell of the capsule. These seeds are comparatively large, and are richly stored with food-stuffs for the supply of the young plantlet. One such richly supplied embryo is worth many little unsupported grains, since it stands a much better chance than they do of surviving in the struggle for existence. The wood-rushes may thus be regarded as some of the earliest plants among the great trinary class to adopt those tactics of storing gluten, starch, and other food-stuffs along with the embryo, which have given the cereals their acknowledged superiority as producers of human food. They are closely connected with the rushes, on the one hand, by sundry intermediate species which possess thin leaves instead of cylindrical, pithy blades; and they lead on to the grasses, on the other, by reason of their very grass-like foliage, and their reduced number of large, well-furnished, starchy seeds.

In another particular, the rush family supplies us with a useful hint in tracing out the pedigree of the grasses and cereals. Their flowers are, for the most part, crowded together in large tufts or heads, each containing a considerable number of minute separate blossoms. Even among the true lilies we find some cases of such crowding in the hyacinths and the squills, or, still better, in the onion and garlic tribe. But, with the wind-fertilized rushes, the grouping together of the flowers has important advantages, because it enables the pollen more easily to fix upon one or other of the sensitive surfaces, as the stalks sway backward and forward before a gentle breeze. Among yet more developed or degraded wind-fertilized plants, this crowding of the blossoms becomes even more conspicuous. A common American rush-like water-plant, known as eriocaulon, helps us to bridge over the gap between the' rushes and such compound flowers as the sedges and grasses. Eriocaulon and its allies have always one seed only in each cell of the pistil; and they have also generally a very delicate corolla and calyx, of from four to six pieces, representing the original three sepals and three petals of the lilies and rushes. But their minute blossoms are closely crowded together in globular heads, the stamens and pistils being here divided in separate flowers, though both kinds