Ancient Plants: Being a Simple Account of the past Vegetation of the Earth and of the Recent Important Discoveries Made in This Realm of NatureStopes, Marie Carmichael
Science
Ancient Plants: Being a Simple Account of the past Vegetation of the Earth and of the Recent Important Discoveries Made in This Realm of Nature
Stopes, Marie Carmichael
Paleobotany
We have seen in the past how the differentiation of size in the spores
resulted in sex, and in the higher plants in the modifications along
widely different lines of the male and female; how the large spore
(female) became enclosed in protecting tissues, which finally led up to
true seeds (see p. 75), while the male being so temporary had no such
elaboration. As the seed advances it becomes more and more complex, and
when we reach still higher plants further surrounding tissues are pressed
into its service and it becomes enclosed in the carpel of the highest
flowering plants. After that the seed itself has fewer general duties,
and instead of those of the Gymnosperms with large endosperms collecting
food before the embryo appears, small ovules suffice, which only develop
after fertilization is assured. The various families of flowering plants
have gone further, and the whole complex series of bracts and fertile
parts which make up a flower is adapted to ensure the crossing of male
and female of different individuals. The complex mechanisms which seem
adapted for “cross fertilization” are innumerable, and are found in the
highest groups of the flowering plants. But some have gone beyond the
stage when the individual flowers had each its device, and accomplished
its seed-bearing independently of the other flowers on the same branch.
These have a combination of many flowers crowded together into one
community, in which there is specialization of different flowers for
different duties. In such a composite flower, the Daisy for example, some
are large petalled and brightly coloured to attract the pollen-carrying
insects, some bear the male organs only, and others the female or
seed-producing. Here, then, in the most advanced type of flowering plant
we get back again to the separation of the sexes in separate flowers; but
these flowers are combined in an organized community much more complex
than the cones of the Gymnosperms, for example, where the sexes are
separate on a lower plane of development.
It seems possible that an important group, if not the dominant group, of
flowering plants in the future will be so organized that the individual
flowers are very simple, with fewer parts than those of to-day, but that
they will be combined in communities of highly specialized individuals in
each flower head or cluster.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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