The equipment which different flowers have developed for this purpose, their almost uncanny devices to make certain that only the distant and foreign male can ever impregnate the female, the enormous wastage of both unfertilized females and males that will never become fathers, and the overwhelming effectiveness of it all, in spite of this prodigality--these manifestations of the production of young in the plant world will take up the rest of this chapter. All the first part will tell of this process in flowering plants, while the second shows how flowerless plants accomplish the same end in more secret ways. Finally, in a brief third part, we shall see how, without mating of the sexes, nature has still one other way to see to it that there is a constant supply of young. We have already made clear that all plants are divided upon the basis of whether they bear flowers and their mating goes on before the world, or whether they bear none and the process is accomplished in more secret ways. Because flowers are so much better known, and it is simpler to see how the act is consummated in them than in the _cryptogamous plants_, we shall first consider the _phanerogams_ or flowering plants, and in the second section of this chapter the _cryptogams_ or flowerless plants. 1. VISIBLE MARRIAGE OF FLOWERING PLANTS In the first chapter, under the section devoted to flowers, we found that the stamens are the male and the pistils the female organs of reproduction. As the period for mating draws near there is developed in the _anther_, which is the enlarged tip of the stamen, a fine, usually yellow, powder known as _pollen_. This matures in the anther, and when ripe is discharged from tiny pores. Pollen is made up of individual _pollen grains_, which are very often stuck together so that we see only the mass, not the individual pollen grain. Sometimes the pollen is not sticky, as in the case of pine trees or in the ragweed--a fertile cause of hay fever. In these, and hundreds of other plants, the wind will blow great clouds of pollen through the air. When we stop to consider that a single, or at most a very few pollen grains are all that are necessary--in fact, are all that _can_ be of real service--the enormous wastage of the male fertilizing substance, in order that mating be secured, gives us some idea of how prodigal is nature in this supreme function.