"I said I would show you some magic. Well, this magic has to do with
plant improvement. It is not much of a trick to raise a plant, but it is
a great one to be able to improve that plant.

"Let me tell you of a friend of mine whom we will call Rodney, because
that is his real name. One day Rodney noticed the gardener doing
something with a little flat knife to a pansy. Then he tied a little
paper bag over the pansy, of course leaving the whole thing on the
plant.

"'What are you doing?' asked the lad. 'I am fixing that pansy so that
the seed from it shall be finer seed than they otherwise would be.'

"Then the old gardener explained this to Rodney: There are two parts to
flowers which are very necessary, absolutely necessary to making seed.
One part is the pistil, the other the stamen. Some flowers have both
pistils and stamen, while others have just the pistil and one has to
hunt for another plant having the stamen. You can tell the stamens in
this way: they are the parts which have in their care the pollen. Most
of you know pollen as a yellow powder or dust. Sometimes it is a sticky
gummy mass. The pistil is that part of the flower which ends in the seed
vessel. It very often takes a central position in the flower, standing
up importantly as if it were the 'part' of the flower. And after all, it
is. Now, when this pollen powder falls on the pistil it does not
explode. The pistil merely opens up a bit and down travels the powder
into the seed vessel to help form seed. There would be no real fertile
seed without the pollen.

"Sometimes the pollen from one flower falls on its own pistil, sometimes