Flowers, Fruits and Leaves

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Macmillan, 1886 - 147 páginas

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Página 98 - But the leaves of the herbage at our feet take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Starshaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, arrow-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whorls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same from footstalk to blossom ; they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness, and take delight in outstripping our wonder.
Página 117 - Here in the houseless wild, to direct the traveller's journey Over the sea-like, pathless, limitless waste of the desert.
Página 97 - Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity : children love them ; quiet, tender, contented ordinary people love them as they grow; luxurious and disorderly people rejoice in them gathered : They are the cottager's treasure ; and in the crowded town, mark, as with a little...
Página 98 - Now. why is this marvellous variety, this inexhaustible treasury of beautiful forms ? Does it result from some innate tendency of each species? Is it intentionally designed to delight the eye of man ? Or has the form and size and texture some reference to the structure and organization, the habits and requirements, of the whole plant...
Página 3 - ... unknown until Mr. Darwin devoted himself to the subject. Our illustrious countryman was the first clearly to perceive that the essential service which insects perform to flowers, consists not only in transferring the pollen from the stamens to the pistil, but in transferring it from the stamens of one flower to the pistil of another. Sprengel had indeed observed in more than one instance that this was the case, but he did not altogether appreciate the importance of the fact. Mr. Darwin, however,...

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