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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ni. HOUSE-PLANTS. — continued. Each new description should notice more points about the flower than the preceding one. But it is impossible, as has already been said, to give any rule for the rate of progress, which must depend upon the capacity of the class. The teacher alone can judge how fast new ideas can be suggested, and with the new ideas the new terms with which to express them. It is well to make the pupils feel the need of technical terms, to allow them to describe the things they see in their own language, and discover how much trouble is saved by a single expressive word, before supplying them with the necessary terms. Only a few points about each flower will be mentioned in this chapter, but a full account of each plant will be found in the Appendix. Fuchsia coccinea.1 This flower will probably prove easy to describe. It is large and perfectly regular, complete, and symmetrical. The parts are in fours. The corolla and stamens are joined to the calyx above the ovary. The same difficulty arises here that we noticed in the Snowdrop. Shall we regard the calyx as beginning at the base of the flower or on top of the ovary? There is a difference in opinion among botanists on this point. It is probable that in certain flowers the outer covering of the ovary is formed from the calyx tissue, in others from the receptacle growing up around the ovary, and in others from a combination of both calyx and receptacle. We, however, are assuredly not able to decide where the doctors disagree, and we will simply describe the corolla and stamens as inserted on the throat of the calyx. The Fuchsia is a good flower with which to begin the study of aestivation; that is, the disposition of the parts of the flower in the bud. A bud is generally necessary to determine the test...
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