d a little
paper bag over the pansy, of course leaving the whole thing on the
plant.

"'What are you doing?' asked the lad. 'I am fixing that pansy so that
the seed from it shall be finer seed than they otherwise would be.'

"Then the old gardener explained this to Rodney: There are two parts to
flowers which are very necessary, absolutely necessary to making seed.
One part is the pistil, the other the stamen. Some flowers have both
pistils and stamen, while others have just the pistil and one has to
hunt for another plant having the stamen. You can tell the stamens in
this way: they are the parts which have in their care the pollen. Most
of you know pollen as a yellow powder or dust. Sometimes it is a sticky
gummy mass. The pistil is that part of the flower which ends in the seed
vessel. It very often takes a central position in the flower, standing
up importantly as if it were the 'part' of the flower. And after all, it
is. Now, when this pollen powder falls on the pistil it does not
explode. The pistil merely opens up a bit and down travels the powder
into the seed vessel to help form seed. There would be no real fertile
seed without the pollen.

"Sometimes the pollen from one flower falls on its own pistil, sometimes
the wind, the bees, the birds carry the pollen to flowers far off and
drop it on their pistils. Marvelous, is it not? Everything has to be
just right, or the pollen does not do its work nor the pistil, either.
Pollen has to be ripe to help make the seed.

"But how can the work of the wind and the bees and the birds be improved
on? Just as the old gardener was doing it. He had one pansy, oh such a
large one, but not at all beautiful in colour. He had another one, small
but exquisite in colouring. If he could but grow those two together,
shake them up, say a magic word and get a pansy both beautiful and
large!

"Rodney's gardener used magic but not a magic wand. He took a little
knife called a scalpel. He carefully took some pollen from the beautiful
pansy and then rubbed it gently over the pistil of the big pansy. The
pollen was all ready to drop, and by this he knew it was ripe.

"Why did he place a bag over the pansy? Well, simply because he didn't
wish that pansy interfered with. Suppose the bag were not on; suppose
after he had put the pollen on, the wind had blown other pollen to this
same pistil? Let us suppose that this other pollen came from a very
inferior flower. The experiment would hav