Petals in ordinary flowers are intended to secure the attention of insects; to wind-fertilized blossoms, having no occasion for visitors, they are unnecessary. So far from an advantage, the presence of a corolla would exclude the wind from the essential organs. Accordingly, petals are either absent altogether or reduced to rudimentary proportions. The calyx is also much reduced, and in some flowers is dispensed with entirely. Comparatively few anemophilous flowers possess both sets of floral envelopes. Plantago is, however, dichlamydeous, but its chaffy petals afford incontrovertible evidence of degeneration from the entomophilous condition. The stigma in the wind-fertilized class is highly specialized, and much larger relatively to the other parts of the flower than is the case with entomophilous blossoms. It is commonly penicillate, consisting of a tuft of hairs, as in nettle; feathery, as in grasses; or elongated and thread-like, as in plantago and the rushes. The spirally twisted stigmas of the last-mentioned flowers are beautiful objects when examined with a pocket lens. The larger the surface which the stigma presents to the wind, the greater are the chances of pollination. Its fine fringes of papillose hairs are also well calculated to entangle the pollen-grains, while the viscid secretion serves to retain them when caught. This adaptation may be seen in the common rye grass; each tiny blossom as it expands hangs out its two white, feathery stigmas from the sides of the spikelet, reminding one of a fisherman spreading out his nets, or a sailor his studding sails to catch the favoring breeze. At the time of fertilization the dock, too, thrusts out its three little brush-like stigmas between the lobes of the perianth. It is instructive to compare these wind-fertilized flowers of Rumex with those of the nearly allied genus Polygonum, which is entomophilous. The perianth of the latter is rose-colored; the stigmas are included within it, never exserted as in the dock--they are not at all brush-like or feathery, but in the form of little knobs; the stamens and flower-stalks are rigid; moreover, the various species of Polygonum secrete nectar and are frequented by many different insects. Stigmas are entirely absent in the gymnospermous division, but in most Coniferæ the ovule at the time of flowering secretes a drop of liquid, and the pollen-grains caught on it are, as the fluid gradually evaporates, stranded on the nucleus of the ovule. The ovule of the larch is provided with elongated papillæ, functionally equivalent to a stigma.