"Pollen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not physical—some mad poetic thing, forever struggling in the tight matrices of a hard-set world. India was rising clearer to Skag; even certain of her profound complexities. He knew that instant how the fertilising pollen of the West was needed here, and how the West needed the enfolding spiritual culture which is the breath within the breath of the East. This swift realisation had something to do with his own real work. It was filmy, yet memorable—like ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... olden days. Hope like the gorgeous rose sun-warmed Blossomed and blew away and died, Till gentleness had ceased to be And Tarsus knew no chivalry Could live an hour by Cydnus' side Where all the heirs of evil swarmed. And yet—with every swelling spring Each pollen-scented zephyr's breath Repeats the patient news to ears Made dull by dreams of loveless years, "It is of life, and not of death That ye shall hear the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... beheld a butterfly and, catching her, held her in his hands and feasted his eyes upon her prettiness. But as he held her so, the pollen rubbed off her wings and she fluttered, a pitiable thing, weakly ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... of the great freethinker; whose Philosophe Ignorant may indeed be connected with the APOLOGY without any of the hesitation with which Villemain suggests his general parallel. In fine, Montaigne has scattered his pollen over all the literature of France. The most typical thought of La Rochefoucauld is thrown out[158] in the essay[159] De l'utile et de l'honneste; and the most modern-seeming currents of thought, as M. Stapfer remarks, can be detected in the ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... The ivy especially is a little continent of life where-ever it grows. Clambering over a wall or climbing up among the sloes in a blackthorn it attracts bee and wasp and fly, blue fly and grey fly and green fly, to graze on the pollen of its late flowers. The ivy is the last of the plants to flower, and insects come to it as from the ends of the earth in rejoicing myriads. Among the berries in the hedges the birds, too, rejoice. The robin, though for the most part, I believe, a meat-eater, becomes unambiguously happy at this ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... such queer things about orchids," he said one day; "such possibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid-flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance; there are no insects known that can possibly ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... dried glass plates from the vacuum drier. The fractionator turned itself off and he focused on and studied the slide it yielded. He inspected a sample of the dust he'd gotten from the garments that had been sprayed at the south gate. The dust contained common dust particles and pollen particles and thread particles and all sorts of microscopic debris. But throughout all the sample he saw certain infinitely tiny crystals. They were too small to be seen separately by the naked eye, but they had a definite crystalline form. And ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... pistil are the essential organs of a flower, because they, and they only, are needed in the formation of seeds. The pollen from the stamen, acting on the pistil, causes the ovules which are in the pistil to ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... throng; Thus pours the mountain torrent wild, That stubborn rocks would check; Thus rolls the molten lava stream, Dispersing havoc dire, supreme, Enfolding, whelming all in wreck! Thus flies the pollen on the breeze To meet its floral love; The song, outgushing from the soul, Thus seeks the starry vault above. Is it a curse? There is no other life for me. 'Tis written in the book of fate: Thy race must ev'ry pledge abate And wander, rove eternally! ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... you, malcontent Male wind— Shaking the pollen from a flower Or hurling the sea backward from the ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... is a big bumble-bee who tries to force himself into the flower, brutally; but his mouth cannot reach the nectar, and the poor glutton strives and strives in vain. He has to give up the attempt, and comes out of the flower all smeared over with pollen. He flies off in his own heavy lumbering way; but there are not many flowers in this portion of the suburbs, which has been defiled by the soot and smoke of factories. So he comes back to the columbine again, and this time he pierces the corolla and sucks the honey ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... had heard of Owen: they met as enemies—a very good way to begin an acquaintance. It was Nature's old, old game of stamen, pistil and pollen, that fertilizes the world of business, betterment and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Orchis—the Angraecum sesquipedale—with an immensely long and deep nectary. How did such an extraordinary organ come to be developed? Mr. Darwin's explanation is this. The pollen of this flower can only be removed by the base of the proboscis of some very large moths, when trying to get at the nectar at the bottom of the vessel. The moths with the longest probosces would do this most effectually; they would be rewarded for their long tongues ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... flower. It is, of course, possible that in this case the rose may not have caused the disturbance, and as it is distinctly stated that it was the smell to which the Cardinal objected, we may fairly conclude that what annoyed him was simply a manifestation of rose-fever excited by the pollen. There is also an instance of a noble Venetian who was always confined to his palace during the rose season. However, in this connection Sir Kenelm Digby relates that so obnoxious was a rose to Lady Heneage, that ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and rapid death. Inasmuch as there were many proteins in the atmosphere at that time due to the unrestrained pollination of plants of every description, it was not surprising that they found as many as ten per cent of the white race afflicted with a slight pollen sensitivity which showed up seasonally by causing spasms of the smooth muscle of the respiratory system, a disease popularly ...
— The Sword and the Atopen • Taylor H. Greenfield
... to make it a common interest; that is, I will give away a sheet full of Sonnets. One to Mrs. Barbauld; one to Wakefield; one to Dr. Beddoes; one to Wrangham—a college acquaintance of mine,—an admirer of me, and a pitier of my principles;—one to George Augustus Pollen, Esq.; one to C. Lamb; one to Wordsworth; one to my brother George, and one to Dr. Parr. These Sonnets I mean to write on the blank leaf, respectively, of each copy. * * * * God ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... hole in the brickwork of the house, and getting my net I waited to capture it; after about five minutes the bee came out and flew into the net. It proved to be a solitary mason bee, and was doubtless forming a place to lay its egg, only, unlike the wasp, she would give the young grub pollen from the stamens of flowers to feed upon instead of green caterpillars. I remember seeing a mass of clay which had been formed into a wasp's nest by one of the solitary species, under the flap of a pembroke table in an unused room. A maid in dusting lifted up the flap, and down fell ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... learned that plants can make better and stronger seeds when they can get the pollen dust from other plants. But I am sure that you will be very much surprised to hear that the colors, the scent, and the curious shapes of the flowers are all so many baits to attract insects. And for what reason? In order that ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... the wild-wood larch, Where the clematis and wild woodbine Festoon the flowering eglantine; Where in every flower, shrub, and tree Is heard the hum of the honey-bee, And the linden blossoms are softly stirred, As the fanning wings of the humming-bird Scatter a perfume of pollen dust, That mounts to the kindling soul like must; Where the turtles each spring their loves renew— The old, old story, "coo-roo, coo-roo," Mingles with the wooing note That bubbles from the song-bird's ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... pollen smokes, silver runs the rain, Still the timid mists creep out when the sun lies down— Oh, I am weary waiting to return to you again, So take a pale, familiar face ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... which come to nothing! Does it, therefore, follow that the rains which are bestowed upon the soil with such rule and average regularity were not designed to support vegetable and animal life? Consider, likewise, the vast proportion of seeds and pollen, of ova and young,—a thousand or more to one,—which come to nothing, and are therefore purposeless in the same sense, and only in the same sense, as are Darwin's unimproved and unused slight variations. The world is full of such cases; and these must answer the argument,—for we cannot, except ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... coils of phacelia. In the shrub shelter, in the season, flock the little stemless things whose blossom time is as short as a marriage song. The larkspurs make the best showing, being tall and sweet, swaying a little above the shrubbery, scattering pollen dust which Navajo brides gather to fill their marriage baskets. This were an easier task than to find two of them of a shade. Larkspurs in the botany are blue, but if you were to slip rein to the stub of some black sage and set about proving it you would ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... that have fallen upon this earth, the endeavor to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees. Symons' Meteorological Magazine is especially prudish in this respect and regards as highly improper all advances made by ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... by the stile, beyond which the willows were splendid against the blue with silvery aments and golden pollen, they turned by mutual impulse and retraced their steps. "I've simply had no one to talk to down here," she said. "Not what ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... sweet lips no word hath ever fallen To tell my heart its love is not in vain— The bee that wooes the flow'r hath honey and pollen To cheer him on and bring him back again: But what have I, your other friends above, To feed my love, to ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... almond-tree: first, the Horned Osmia, clad in black velvet on the head and breast and in red velvet on the abdomen; and, a little later, the Three-horned Osmia, whose livery must be red and red only. These are the first delegates despatched by the pollen-gleaners to ascertain the state of the season and attend the festival of the early blooms. 'Tis but a moment since they burst their cocoon, the winter abode: they have left their retreats in the crevices of the old walls; should the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... open between,—here little glades filled with flowers, there grand meadows overgrown with grass—so tall that the horseman riding through it has his shoulders swept by the spikes, which shed their pollen ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... full month now, had failed to mature, such stalks as had tasselled at all being as barren as the rest because the tender silks had dried too rapidly and could furnish no fertilizing moisture to the pollen which sifted down from the ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... continued Mr. Mills, "that certain vegetables are very closely related and will intermingle. For example, do not plant different kinds of corn close together. The pollen from one kind will fertilize another kind and so you get a crossing which results in a mongrel sort of corn. Melons and cucumbers will do the same thing. And so care must be taken in order that this sort of intermingling does not ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... cannot be chance. There is too much method in the mad tumble of it all, too much plot and counter-plot, too much cunning intent—which even we can appreciate—for us to think that it has no meaning. Why, the very wind that blows has its assured direction and carries the pollen of this flower to the heart ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... more or less decumbent with irregular branches. The flower-buds are peculiarly stout and barrel-shaped, with a protrusion on one side. The seed-capsules are short and thick, containing relatively few seeds, and the pollen is ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... down on the dry ground to eat. The earth was quiet—only a little breath of wind and the sound of a bird here and there. I lay and watched the branches waving gently in the breeze; the little wind was at its work, carrying pollen from branch to branch and filling every innocent bloom; all the forest seemed filled with delight. A green worm thing, a caterpillar, dragged itself end by end along a branch, dragging along unceasingly, as if it could ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... individual exceptions, as plants and animals evolve, the union of two elements, male and female, is needed to start the amazingly complex process of building a new individual. Thus in flowers the stamens, the pollen bearers, provide the male element which, through the intermediary of the pistils, fertilizes the egg in the vesicle. In the higher animals the egg or ovum is produced by the female, and is fertilized by the sperm-cell produced ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... "It conveys the pollen of flowers, and, as I had occasion to state the other day, sows the seeds of Nature's fields and forests. It is likewise made available by man in some classes ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... venenata), and poison oak (Rhus diversiloba of the Pacific Coast, U. S. A.) cause inflammation of the skin in certain persons who touch either one of these plants, or in some cases even if approaching within a short distance of them. The plants contain a poisonous oil, and the pollen blown from them by the wind may thus convey enough of this oil to poison susceptible individuals who are even at a considerable distance. Trouble begins within four to five hours, or in as many days after ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... that each cross of this kind would take from three to five years before he could take the next step an idea is gained of the patience required. Sometimes the results of these crosses would be infertile, producing neither perfect pistil nor viable pollen, as in the case of a handsome scarlet rugosa growing in the National Rose Test Garden which he was unable to use for ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... and likewise why, is dancing? From what flower of nature, fertilized by what pollen of circumstance or necessity, is it the fruit? Let us go to the root ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... chivalrous contempt of wealth. "Your Honours may easily understand that we speak not now for ourselves, but in favour of the Poor, and the labourers defrauded . . . " Not having observed a point which "their Honours" were not the men to "understand easily," Father Pollen writes, "the new preachers were loudly claiming for themselves the property of the rivals whom they had displaced." {186} For themselves they were claiming a few merks, and a few bolls of meal, a decent subsistence. Mr. Taylor Innes points out that when, just before Darnley's ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... be. Once it was the sailor who crossed the sea to find El Dorado and Cathay, now it is the artist who follows in the fascinating quest. But sailor and artist seeking gold in far countries, like the pollen-powdered bee sucking honey in the flowers, bring as rare ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... When pollen-dust from fields of rye Floats out on the dews of even, And stars of June bedeck the sky Of mild and cloudless heaven, 'Tis ecstasy to linger near The odor-laden quivers, Whose lance-like arrows then appear To ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... not in all organic nature, to my mind, any instance of wasted energy comparable in magnitude with the mosquito's thirst for blood, and the instincts and elaborate blood-pumping apparatus with which it is related. The amount of pollen given off by some wind-fertilized trees—so great in some places that it covers hundreds of square miles of earth and water with a film of yellow dust—-strikes us as an amazing waste of material on the part of nature; but in these cases we readily see that this excessive prodigality ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... only part of the tableau arranged. To meet him, Mrs. Ennis had asked her best, for the time being, friend, Mimi de Rochefort—Mary was her right name—and Mimi de Rochefort's best, for the time being, friend, Robert Pollen. Nowadays Pollen came when Madame de Rochefort came; one expected his presence. He had been a habit in this respect for over six months; in fact, almost from the time Madame de Rochefort (she was so ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... alone at an open window. Through it came the voices of the children as they played under the acacia-trees, and the breath of the hot afternoon air. In and out of the room flew the bees, the wild bees, with their legs yellow with pollen, going to and from the acacia-trees, droning all the while. She sat on a low chair before the table and darned. She took her work from the great basket that stood before her on the table: some lay on her knee ...
— Dreams • Olive Schreiner
... suggestions to discover for themselves. Truths which one has found out for himself always mean more than matter that is dogmatically forced upon him. The pupil who has watched the bees sucking honey from clover blossoms and then going with pollen-laden feet to another blossom, or one who has observed the drifting pollen from orchard or corn field, is better able to understand the fertilization of plants than he would be from any mere description of ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... of trees. In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... supposed to render it a sure prey. This is performed only after the track has been followed until either the animal is in sight, or a place is discovered where it has lain down. Then, in exactly the spot over which the heart of the animal is supposed to have rested, he deposits a sacrifice of corn pollen (ta-on-ia), sacred black war paint (tsu-ha-pa)—a kind of plumbago, containing shining particles, and procured by barter from the Ha-va-su-pai (Coconinos), and from sacred mines toward the west—and prayer or sacred meal, made from white seed-corn (emblematic of terrestrial life or of the foods of ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... spike of water-stachys, with here and there blossoming butomus, near the fringe of the banks. Then there were the pond-weeds, and other true water-plants, whose summer luxuriance nearly stopped the navigation of the canal, and whose pollen in July, collecting near the locks, lay there upon the water like a thick scum. As my little boat moved over them, I could note all the wondrous beauty and delicacy of the strange foliage that lives below the air, and preserves so much of the character ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... circumstances is as follows: the quality of the clover fields, furnishing the best food for cattle, depends largely upon the visits to the clover-blossoms by wild bees, that accomplish the fertilization of the flowers by carrying pollen upon their bodies from one plant to another. Field-mice devour the young in the nests of these bees, so if there are few field-mice there will be many bees, and consequently better grazing for the cattle. The number of field-mice will vary according to the abundance ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... slender stems of the pussy willow. Or we tramp through a hazel thicket, where the squirrels have been festive among the nuts all winter, in the hope of finding, among the myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms. We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose every flower-bud ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... passed me without a sign, and went out. In a moment, Lu's voice, a quick, sharp exclamation, touched him; he turned, came back. She, wondering at him, had stood toying with the amber, and at last crushing the miracle of the whole, a bell-wort wrought most delicately with all the dusty pollen grained upon its anthers, crushing it between her fingers, breaking the thread, and scattering the beads upon the carpet. He stooped with her to gather them again, he took from her hand and restored to her afterward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... localization is on the surface of the body, the organisms are contained in or on the thin epithelial scales which are constantly given off. These are light, and may remain floating in the air and carried by air currents just as is the pollen of plants. There seem to have been cases of smallpox where other modes of more direct transmission could be excluded and in which the organisms were carried in the air over a considerable space. All sorts of intermediate objects, both living and inanimate, ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... the value of the patient and laborious researches of the Germans in the grammar and syntax of the ancient languages and in archaeology. They are painstaking to a painful degree. They gather facts as bees gather pollen, indefatigably. But when it comes to making honey they go dry. They cannot interpret, they can only instruct. They do not comprehend, they only classify. Name me one recent German book of classical interpretation to compare in sweetness and light with Jowett's 'Dialogues of Plato' or Butcher's ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... "Berber may be a Martian, or perhaps he was originally destined to be the first man on Jupiter. He took the wrong car and landed on this globe. Why not? How do we know what agency carries pollen of human life from planet ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tubular principles are constantly met with, as essential parts of the characters and organic necessities of the plant: the cone and the funnel mostly in buds and flower-petals for protection and inclosure of the pollen and seed germs, the tube for conducting the juices; the spherical form to resist moisture externally, or to hold it internally, or to avoid friction, and facilitate close storage, as in the case of seeds in pods. The ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... cause him to uproot his trees. Often by waiting a few seasons—if the tree is of the correct variety—the trouble may right itself. Many growers have gotten a crop from single trees where there was trouble with the pollination by artificially fertilizing, that is, shaking the pollen from fertile trees, even black walnut, over the barren pistillates. Birds, insects, and the breezes carry pollen from one tree to another. Therefore, if nuts for seed are desired, keep each grove of ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... obsessed by this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing less than poetry itself, of shunning the contemporary world he was studying, he had rushed into an ideal and fruitful country, had dreamed of fantastic passions of skies, of long raptures of earth, and of fecund rains of pollen falling into panting organs of flowers. He had ended in a gigantic pantheism, had created, unwittingly perhaps, with this Edenesque environment in which he placed his Adam and Eve, a marvelous Hindoo poem, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... One pollen-laden fellow was soon caught, the gum stick touched its back, the white cotton was brought in contact, and the ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... food; she packs these maggots so closely together that they cannot move nor turn into chrysalides, and just enough of them to support the larva until it becomes a chrysalis. A kind of bug (cerceris bupresticida), which itself lives only upon pollen, lays her eggs in an underground cell, and with each one of them she deposits three beetles, which she has lain in wait for and captured when they were still weak through having only just left off being chrysalides. She kills these beetles, and appears to smear them with a fluid whereby she ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... apparently sandy deposit, twenty feet in thickness, under the "Luneburgerheyde," is composed entirely of infusoria of a kind still living in the neighborhood of Berlin. This layer rests upon a brown deposit known to be ten feet in thickness. The latter consists, for one fifth of the depth, of pine pollen, which burns. The rest is of infusoria. Thus these animals, which the naked eye has not power to discern, have themselves the power to build up mountain chains. ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... made up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case, which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in the lowest animals, a single mass of such protoplasm may constitute the whole plant, or the protoplasm may exist ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... debased image of womanhood in his heart of hearts. With some children—and some mothers—this might well be the child's first introduction to the subject. Afterwards he could be shown the flower and its seeds, the fish and its eggs, the egg of the bird, and somewhat later introduced to the pollen of the flower as necessary to the ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... the bennets vary, some green, some yellowish, some brown, some approaching whiteness, according to age and the condition of the sap. Their tops, too, are never the same, whether the pollen clings to the surface or whether it has gone. Here the green is almost lost in red, or quite; here the grass has a soft, velvety look; yonder it is hard and wiry, and again graceful and drooping. Here there are bunches so rankly verdant that no flower ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... deuometh' oixomenou, kai se pothoumen aei. eipe de Pieridon tis anastrephtheisa pros allen: elthen, idou, panton philtatos elthe broton, stemmata drepsamenos neothelea xersi geraiais, kai polion daphnais amphekalupse kara, 10 edu ti Sikelikais epi pektisin, edu ti xordais, aisomenos: pollen gar meteballe luran, pollaki d' en bessaisi kathemenon euren Apollon, anthesi d' estepsen, terpna d' edoke legein, Pana t' aeimneston te Pitun Koruthon te dusedron, en t' ephilese thean thnetos Amadruada: pontou d' en megaroisin ekoimise Kumodameian, ten t' Agamemnonian ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cats no clover' is explained by assigning the intermediate steps in the following series; that the fructification of red clover depends on the visits of humble-bees, who distribute the pollen in seeking honey; that if field-mice are numerous they destroy the humble-bees' nests; and that (owls and weasels being exterminated by gamekeepers) the destruction of field-mice depends upon the supply of cats; which, therefore, are a remote condition of the clover ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... gate, and watch the robins crowding the branches of the Mountain Ash, where the bright red berries cluster. I see the terrible bumble-bee bear down the Poppy on its slender stem and go buzzing threateningly away, all pollen-covered. ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... peculiar sensitive area in the mucous membrane of the nose. An exciting cause circulating in the air, the dust or pollen of certain plants, such as rag-weed, hay and barley; the odor of certain flowers, such as roses and golden rod; dust of some drugs as ipecac and benzoic acid; the odor of some animals. It usually comes about the same date each year, growing ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... is pursued intelligently and delightfully. To illustrate again. The wild rose looked at simply as a thing of beauty and perfume becomes yet more interesting to the child who watches the bee gather its golden pollen and its luscious nectar. There is a bond of union now between the fragile flower and its winged guest that begets an altruism which later becomes normally the corner-stone of character. When the graceful tribute of the bee to the flower is presently ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... aggregated in small cones ("flowers"), crowded about the base of a growing shoot terminating the branches (Fig. 77, A [Male]). The individual leaves (sporophylls) are nearly triangular in shape, and attached by the smaller end. On the lower side of each are borne two sporangia (pollen sacs) (C, sp.), opening by a longitudinal slit, and filled with innumerable yellow microspores (pollen spores), which fall out as a shower of yellow dust if the branch ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... outside the pistil of a flower you usually will find a row of slender, thread-like stalks, each bearing a soft, oblong body at the top, falling out of which you will see a fine yellow powder called pollen. It is a peculiar fact that these seeds never can grow into new plants unless they are fertilized, that is, unless they receive some pollen. It is another peculiar fact that although nearly every flower has this pollen ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... for each egg. That is her only work; for she leaves the whole care of her children to the industrious working-bees, who have various labors to perform. Some of them build cells of wax; others bring in honey on the dust of flowers, called pollen; yet others feed and take care of the young; and a small number act as body-guard to ...
— The Nursery, June 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... wishes to disburse himself in the nest, finds the cellule which he has to fill, and proceeds always in the same order: first, he plunges his head in the cell and disgorges the honey which fills his crop; secondly, he emerges from the cell, turns round, and lets fall the pollen which remains attached to his legs. Suppose that an insect has just disgorged his honey, the observer touches his belly with a straw; the little animal, disturbed in his operation, returns to it having only the second act to perform. ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... said, further, that new varieties may be produced by placing the pollen from the flowers of one plant upon the pistils in the flowers of another and then covering the plant with fine gauze to keep insects out. With the herbs, however, this method seems hardly worth while, because the flowers are as a rule very small and the work necessarily finicky, ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... emit a fragrance scarcely inferior to Mignonet; its leaves, contrary to most others, grow inverted, which is effected by a twist of the footstalk, and afford an excellent example of LINNAEUS's Folium resupinatum; the filaments, after the pollen is discharged, turn upwards, and the antherae ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 4 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... Lafontaine put on her kindliest smile as ushered in by the maid Mr. John C. Bedelle came magnificently into the room, spick and span, cool as the cucumber is credited to be at any temperature; an immaculate purple tie blooming under an unsullied collar, with only a slight pollen on the carefully-divided hair. How was she to know that, in five minutes, under the sting of betrayed confidence and broken illusions, a complete moral transformation had made of the urchin a man in the embryo, fired by the burning ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... ashes, or tanner's bark, around peach trees, prevent the attack of the worm. The yellows, is a disease of peach trees, which is spread by the pollen of the blossom. When a tree begins to turn yellow, take it away, with all its roots, before it blossoms again, or it will infect other trees. Planting tansy around the roots of fruit trees, is a sure protection against worms, as it prevents the moth from depositing ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... right hand and exclaiming, with a quite innocent and French freedom of speech, "O my God! That's very good. That's capital." Perhaps one of the most interesting things that I ever heard him say was when, after describing to me an experiment in which he had placed under a bell-jar some pollen from a male flower, together with an unfertilized female flower, in order to see whether, when kept at a distance but under the same jar, the one would act in any way on the other, he remarked:—"That's a fool's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... latter part of spring, when the ventilators are opened and bees have ready access, it is necessary to use artificial fertilization in order to get the fruit to set. With a small soft brush, dust the pollen over the pistils. With the English forcing cucumbers, this will not be necessary. While fruit is setting, the houses should be kept ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... had found time to give it, it had leaped its three acres and rioted through the Hollow. There were scarlet runners crossing the abandoned sluices, peas climbing the court-house wall, strawberries matting the trail, while the seeds and pollen of its few homely Eastern flowers had been blown far and wide through the woods. By a grim satire, Nature seemed to have been the only thing that still prospered in ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... think of cases in any one species in genus, or genus in family, with certain parts extra developed, and some adjoining parts reduced? In varieties of the same species double flowers and large fruits seem something of this—want of pollen and of seeds balancing with the increased number of petals and development of fruit. I hope we shall see ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the Positive, the 'Knowable', whose priests handled hammers, spectroscopes, electric batteries—and who set up for me a whole Pantheon of science fetiches. I bought a microscope and peered into tissues, pollen cells, diatoms, ditch ooze; and pitied my clever and very talented grandmother who died ignorant of the family secrets revealed by 'totemism', ignorant of 'parthenogenesis' which proved so conclusively the truth of her own firm conviction, that the faults ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... crossing these hybrids was to remove the catkins on the pistillate plant at any time before they developed and scattered their pollen. The wood containing the catkins to be used for pollinating was observed closely in order to bring it in at the same time with the Rush pistillates by cutting and holding back in a cold cellar after the catkins were swelling well. This was the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... carried in a blanket slung on my tent poles, and even the Tibetans suffered. I felt no inconvenience, but as I unsaddled Gyalpo I was glad that there was no more work to do! This 'mountain-sickness,' called by the natives ladug, or 'pass-poison,' is supposed by them to be the result of the odour or pollen of certain plants which grow on the passes. Horses and mules are unable to carry their loads, and men suffer from vertigo, vomiting, violent headache and bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears, as well ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... eyes on one huge bud. He saw it swell, burst, spread out its passionate purple velvet, lift the broad flower face to the light for a joyous minute. A few seconds later a butterfly lighted airily to sample its nectar and to brush the pollen from its yellow dusted wings. Scarcely had the winged visitor flown away than the purple petals began to wither and fall away, leaving the seed pod on the stem. The visible change went on in this seed pod. It turned rapidly brown, dried ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... engaged a handsome young secretary, "under the patronage of Lady Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by both." Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for one hour, they are open to take animation from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... most marvellous development of Nature I have seen, for its wonderful divergence from, and yet analogy to, what takes place on earth. You know our flowers offer honey, as it were, as bait to insects, that in eating or collecting it they may catch the pollen on their legs and so carry it to other flowers, perhaps of the opposite sex. Here flowers evidently appeal to the sense of hearing instead of taste, and make use of birds, of which there are enormous numbers, instead of winged insects, of which I have seen none, one being ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... delicate strain of music is to the ear. It was almost transcendental. I walked across the hill with my nose in the air taking it in. It lasted for two days. I imagined it came from the willows of a distant swamp, whose catkins were affording the bees their first pollen: or did it come from much farther,—from beyond the horizon, the accumulated breath of innumerable farms and budding forests? The main characteristic of these April odors is their uncloying freshness. They are not sweet, they are oftener bitter, they are penetrating and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first opened ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... enhancing the beauty of flowers—destroys their reproductive capacity. But the analogy is a false one. Flowers become sterile when the stamens—or male organs—are changed into petals, as may be seen by inspecting a rose; and when through excessive dampness the pollen loses its fertilizing power. Then,—in order that the gastronomic regime may produce the results claimed for it,—not only must the females be fattened, but the males must ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... plants offer a closer, though not perfect, analogy. Thus, in the florets of some compositous flowers, the pistil, besides its proper female functional end, serves to brush the pollen off the anthers; while, in the florets of some other compositae (see the account of Silphium in 'Ch. K. Sprengel Das entdeckte Geheimniss der Natur'), the pistil is functionless for its proper end, the flower being ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... of flame and snow. Eugenia, standing in its midst, a tall woman in a dress of brown, fell in richly with the surrounding colours. Her arms were filled with the yellow plumes and her dress was tinselled with the dried pollen that floated in the air. As Nicholas reached her she was seeking to free herself from the clutch of a crimson briar that crawled along the ground, and in the effort some of the broken stalks ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... at the urge of a compelled abandon, Chiquita sank lower and lower. Nearer she came and nearer. The pollen from the flowers at her breast sifted on to his face. Now their eyes were level. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... excellent schemes for his poor parishioners, when in after years he held the living of Hitcham. My intimacy with such a man ought to have been, and I hope was, an inestimable benefit. I cannot resist mentioning a trifling incident, which showed his kind consideration. Whilst examining some pollen-grains on a damp surface, I saw the tubes exserted, and instantly rushed off to communicate my surprising discovery to him. Now I do not suppose any other professor of botany could have helped laughing at my coming in such a hurry ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... such plants must, during the flowering period, be protected from the influence of all foreign pollen, or be easily ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... lilies lighted by the tapers, their white petals and their yellow pollen in gold dust! Oh, their fragrance in the gardens or in the church, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... are but the infantile and adolescent stages of the life history of the cosmic individual; the dark star, its adult stage, or time of true virility. Or we may think of the shrunken dark star as the germ-cell, the pollen-grain, of the cosmic organism. Reduced in size, as becomes a germ-cell, to a mere fraction of the nebular body from which it sprang, it yet retains within its seemingly non-vital body all the potentialities of the original organism, and requires ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... water- wagtail's—and appeared to reflect a moment. He held the soft feather tenderly between a thumb and finger that were thick as a walking-stick and stained with roadside mud and yellow with flower-pollen too. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... fore legs and antennae; then walking along the comb to the mouth of the hive, it mounts into the air, flies forth into the fields, alights upon the proper flowers, extracts their juices, collects their pollen, and, kneading it into little balls, deposits them in the sacks upon its feet; and then returning to its hive, it delivers up the honey and the wax and the bread which it has gathered and elaborated. In the hive it works the wax with its paws and feelers into an hexagonal cell with a rhomboidal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... and efforts. Attention has been called to a very interesting fact about the fructification of the domesticated date palm wherever oasis cultivation prevailed in western Asia.[1887] The fructification must be artificial. Men carry the pollen to the female plant and adopt devices to distribute it on the wind or by artificial contact. At the present time this is done by attaching a bunch of the male seed on a branch to windward.[1888] Tylor first suggested that certain ancient pictorial representations are meant to depict ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... admit that what the stranger said was true. And when he came right over to the flower where she was breakfasting and began buzzing around her, and eating pollen, Betsy Butterfly thought that for a stranger ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... and about an inch and a half in diameter. It is of a bright scarlet color when ripe. Many are bitter, others quite sweet. Even melons in a garden may be made bitter by a few bitter kengwe in the vicinity. The bees convey the pollen from one to ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... is this Love? It is nature-wide. The rushing together of the chemical elements; the attraction of suns and planets—all are Love. See how even the plant casts its pollen abroad on the winds, that it may somewhere reach and rest upon the loving bosom of a sister-flower; and there, amid perfume and sweetness and the breath of zephyrs, the great mystery of life is re-enacted. The plant is without ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly |
