Читать книгу Sex & Character онлайн

39 страница из 80

A most remarkable confirmation of my law may be found in the vegetable kingdom, in a group of facts hitherto regarded as isolated and to be so strange as to have no parallel. Every botanist must have guessed already that I have in mind the phenomena of heterostylism, first discovered by Persoon, then described by Darwin and named by Hildebrand. Many Dicotyledons, and a few Monocotyledons, for instance, species of Primulaceæ and Geraneaceæ and many Rubiaceæ, phanerogams in the flowers of which both the pollen and the stigma are functional, although only in cross-fertilisation, so that the flowers are hermaphrodite in structure but unisexual physiologically, display the peculiarity that in different individuals the stamens and the stigma have different lengths. The individuals, all the flowers of which have long styles and therefore high stigmas and short anthers, are, in my judgment, the more female, whilst the individuals with short styles and long anthers are more male. In addition to such dimorphic plants, there are also trimorphic plants, such as Lythrum salicaria, in which the sexual organs display three forms differing in length. There are not only long-styled and short-styled forms, but flowers with styles of a medium length.