This is how the plant forms its seed to bring up new little ones next year, while the leaves and the roots are at work preparing the necessary food.  Think sometimes when you walk in the woods, how hard at work the little plants and big trees are, all around you.  You breathe in the nice fresh oxygen they have been throwing out, and little think that it is they who are making the country so fresh and pleasant, and that while they look as if they were doing nothing but enjoying the bright sunshine, they are really fulfilling their part in the world by the help of this sunshine; earning their food from the ground working it up; turning their leaves where they can best get light (and in this it is chiefly the violet sun-waves that help them), growing, even at night, by making new cells out of the food they have taken in the day; storing up for the winter; putting out their flowers and making their seeds, and all the while smiling so pleasantly in quiet nooks and sunny dells that it makes us glad to see them.

But why should the primroses have such golden crowns? plain green ones would protect the seed quite as well.  Ah! now we come to a secret well worth knowing.  Look at the two primrose flowers, 1 and 2, Fig. 43, p. 163, and tell me how you think the dust gets on to the top of the sticky knob or stigma.  No. 2 seems easy enough to explain, for it looks as if the pollen could fall down easily from the stamens on to the knob, but it cannot fall up, as it would have to do in No. 1.  Now the curious truth is, as Mr. Darwin has shown, that neither of these flowers can get the dust easily for themselves, but of the two No. 1 has the least difficulty.

Look at a withered primrose, and see how it holds its head down, and after a little while the yellow crown falls off.  It is just about as it is falling that the anthers or bags of stamens burst open, and then, in No. 1 (Fig. 44), they are dragged over the knob and some of the grains stick there.  But in the other form of primrose, No. 2, when the flower falls off, the stamens do not come near the knob, so it has no chance of getting any pollen; and while the primrose is upright the tube is so narrow that the dust does not easily fall.  But, as I have said, neither kind gets it very easily, nor is it good for them if they do.  The seeds are much stronger and better if the dust or pollen of one flower is carried away and left on the knob or stigma of another flower; and the only way this can be done is by insects flying from one flower to another and carrying the dust on their legs and bodies.

If you suck the end of the tube of the primrose flower you will find it tastes sweet, because a drop of honey has been lying there.  When the insects go in to get this honey, they brush themselves against the yellow dust-bags, and some of the dust sticks to them, and then when they go to the next flower they rub it off on to its sticky knob.