III
THE HUSBANDS AND WIVES OF PLANTS
Mrs. Edson drew a long breath because she knew the time had arrived when, for her little daughter’s sake, she must give her the information which would mark her growth from girlhood into young womanhood, and the fact disturbed her, for she did not want to lose her little girl, even in exchange for the lovely young lady whom she knew would take that dear little girl’s place. But it must be done, and, thankful that she had studied the subject enough to know how to do it in a nice and plain way, she began:
“In the first place, dear,” she said, “you must know that the flowers are the husbands and wives of plants, made so by nature. They are in their way as truly married as Mr. and Mrs. Jones are in their way, or as your papa and I are. This marriage is a law of nature, invented to carry on the race, whatever that race may be, whether it is that of mankind, or plants, or animals, or birds, or even fishes. For not only do men and flowers marry, everything in nature does the same – turtles, frogs, robins, elephants, everything!”
Elsie wished very much at this point to ask if her mother had ever seen an elephant’s wife, thinking that she must look rather funny, much different, to say the least, from a flower’s wife, but as the answer came to her at once, without asking the question, she said nothing. Of course an elephant’s wife must be another elephant, as the flower’s wife was another flower. But it was all very singular, and the sparkle of her eyes as she looked into her mother’s face showed her interest in what might be coming. Mrs. Edson went on:
“We will begin with plants, because they came first into the world as living beings, and all other living beings not only had their origin in plants but live by aid of them to this day. From the plants grew animals, and from animals grew men and women and little girls. It took a long, long time for all this to come about, so long that the human mind fails to grasp or comprehend it; and at first, when one hears of it for the first time, it seems wholly impossible and unbelievable. But science has proved it to be true, and even shows the exact way in which the various changes were made. Many, if not all, the steps by which we mounted from the condition of a tiny speck of jelly-plant, a speck no bigger than the point of a pin, to become human beings are still in existence and are frequently observed by scientists. With a microscope anybody may see them. So we know that the theory of evolution, as it is called, is a true one. It is also an exceedingly wonderful and beautiful truth, full of secrets and surprises of the most interesting and delightful kind, as I shall show. Now let’s go and examine the buttercup that the bee just married to the second buttercup.”
Elsie jumped up with a little gurgle of joy and ran ahead of her mother to the flower. This was better than playing “secret” with Rosie and Eva and the other girls, for their secrets were not real ones, they were just made up and they did not amount to very much after all, but this was a real one, kept up in earnest with the bees and flowers. And now she was to be let into it! Mrs. Edson bent over the bright yellow blossom, taking it gently in her fingers to prevent it from nodding so briskly in the breeze that they should be unable to examine it closely.
“You see, dear,” she said, pointing with a twig to the different parts as she named them, “right here, in the exact center of the blossom, is a bunch of green growing in the form of an oval, shaped somewhat like an egg with the smaller end upward.”
“Yes, oh, yes!” Elsie answered eagerly. “What is it, mamma?”
“Broadly speaking we will call it the ovary. I am not going to confuse you by giving you too many hard words at first, words like corolla, carpel, style, stigma, and the like. I shall name only two parts of the flower for you to remember just now, because only two are really necessary to be named at this point. So the name of this one is – what?”
“Ovary!” answered Elsie quickly.
“Yes, ovary! It is called so because it contains ovules, which are tiny seeds or eggs. That is the mother part of the plant.”
“The mother!” Elsie queried. “Why, mamma, is there a father too?”
“Yes, dearie, many plants have both a mother and a father part, which grow near together in the same flower, while other plants have only a father part, and still others have only a mother part. This buttercup has both, has both the male and the female principle. The ovary is the female, and here, above it and surrounding it, you see a number of taller spires, yellow in color and each of them bearing a tiny enlargement, a kind of knob, at the top.”
“Yes, yes, but that – that can’t be the papa part! Is it, mamma?” she cried, examining the rather insignificant appearing spires dubiously. “They don’t look much like a – a papa!” she said in some disappointment. Her mother laughed.
“They certainly do not look much like a man-papa,” she returned, “but they form the papa part of the plant, nevertheless, and are truly the papas of the baby buttercups. And their name is the second one that I wish you to remember from now on. It is stamen.”
“Stamen!” said Elsie.
“Yes, each of these stems is called a stamen, and they form the male part of the plant, the father part. Many plants, those of the simpler kinds, have only one stamen and it grows in the flower so that its head hangs right above the ovary. Here you see that all of the stamens are above the ovary, and the reason why they are placed there by nature you will see very soon. What I wish now is to show you why the bee came to the flower.”
“I know – it was for honey! Isn’t that what you said before, mamma?”
“Yes, darling, but do you see any honey here?”
“No, mamma, and I never knew before that buttercups had honey. I always thought honey came from a beehive.”
“It does come to us from a beehive, but it comes from flowers first, and one of the many kinds that furnish it is this buttercup. The bee sips it from the flowers, just a tiny bit from each blossom that he visits, and when he has enough he takes it home to the hive and puts it away to eat by-and-by, in the winter, when there are no flowers growing for him to rifle. He does it just as men lay away money for ‘a rainy day,’ as we say, and as squirrels lay up a store of nuts for the cold weather. Now, suppose you count those flattened, round-cornered parts of the buttercup – how many are there?”
“Five,” said Elsie quickly.
“Yes, there are five of them, and they are called petals. You will notice that they are much narrower and slighter at the bottom than they are at the top. It is at the bottom that they are joined to the central part of the flower. Now, just where they are connected with this central part there is a tiny sack of honey.”
“It must be very tiny,” said Elsie, regarding the slender connection earnestly, “for there isn’t room enough for much, I’m sure. And it must be all covered up, for I can’t see any signs of it.”
“It is covered up. There is a very small scale, or leaf, over it to protect it from those insects who have no right to the honey. But the bee knows how to get at it, and he does so very quickly, once he alights on the blossom, as we have just seen one do. For while he appeared as if he were merely tumbling clumsily around on the flower he was sampling those honey-sacks, and we saw how speedily he finished all five of them on this flower and then buzzed busily away to the other.”
“He was just the same as at dinner, then, wasn’t he mamma! But why did he go to the other flower – didn’t he get all he wanted from this one?”
“No, darlingest, he gets but very little from each flower. If he could take all he wanted from one he would never fly right to another. And then, if all the other insects should do the same, the whole plan of nature would fall through and there would soon be no life on earth.”
Elsie’s eyes looked very large when she heard this.
“Would I die, and you, mamma, and all of us – Alice and Rosie, and, oh, everybody we know?”
“Yes, dearie, all of us. Those few simple plants which still, in the primitive way, fertilize themselves, are not enough and are too weak to carry on the vegetation of the earth, and without the insects and birds and the wind we never should have been born at all; for they are necessary to make the plants reproduce their kinds and grow, and the plants are necessary food for us as well as for the animals that we eat, such as the hens and ducks and sheep and cows. So nature has given each flower only a little honey, not enough for the bee, and he is compelled to fly to many before he becomes satisfied. And this brings us back to the stamen and ovary again, to show what they are for and how the bee marries the two plants together after he has collected his fee of delicious honey.”
“I am all ’tention,” said Elsie, in so quaint an imitation of older folks that her mother was forced to smile, knowing that she had a listener that was interested, to say the least – a listener who felt the importance and gravity of the study which they were now pursuing. Elsie never attempted big words except when she felt dignified.