“The child can learn the difference of the names, color, and forms of flowers as soon as it can learn anything.  The next step would be to simple lessons in the different parts of a plant—­the vegetative organs of roots, stem, leaves, passing on to the reproductive organs in the flower—­calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil.  Let the child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is necessary to the other in producing the little seed or baby plant.”

Let us take a primrose.  Here the mother and father elements are found in the same flower.  At the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket, which is called the ovary, lie a number of small white objects no larger than butterfly-eggs.  These are the eggs or ova of the primrose.  Into this casket, by a secret opening, filmy tubes thrown out by the pollen grains—­now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens and clustered on the stigma—­enter and pour a fertilizing fluid, called “spermatozoa,” through a microscopic gateway, which opens in the wall of the egg and leads to its inmost heart.  The ovule, or future seed, is now fertilized and capable of producing a future primrose.  Covered with many protecting coats, it becomes a perfect seed.  The original casket swells, hardens, is transformed into a rounded capsule or seed-vessel, opening by valves or a deftly constructed hinge.  One day this seed-vessel, crowded with seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of reproduction by dispersing them over the ground, where they sow themselves, and grow and become primrose plants in their turn, starring the grass with their lovely blossoms.[17]

Sometimes the male and female elements grow upon different plants, as in the catkins children are so fond of gathering in the spring.

“More than two thousand years ago Herodotus observed a remarkable custom in Egypt.  At a certain season of the year the Egyptians went into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and bringing them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the date-palm.  Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but they knew that if they neglected it the date-crop would be poor or wholly lost.  But the true reason is now explained.  Palm-trees, like human beings, are male and female.  The garden plants, the date bearers, were females, the desert plants were males; and the waving of the branches over the females meant the transference of the pollen dust from the one to the other."[18]

From these two elements, the spermatozoa, or male element, and the ova, or female element, all life, except in the lowest organisms, is produced.

You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but all animal life is fed.  Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds, form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or grass before it can become meat for man.