Identifier: flowerbeeplant00love (find matches)
Title: The flower and the bee; plant life and pollination
Year: 1918 (1910s)
Authors: Lovell, John Harvey, 1860-1939
Subjects: Fertilization of plants
Publisher: New York, C. Scribner's sons
Contributing Library: The LuEsther T Mertz Library, the New York Botanical Garden
Digitizing Sponsor: The LuEsther T Mertz Library, the New York Botanical Garden

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d chlorophyll. Yellow Flowers The green pigment, or chlorophyll, in leaves is invariablyaccompanied by two yeUow pigments, carrotin, so-called be-cause it is common in the root of the carrot, and xanthophyll, orleaf-yellow. Carrotin, to which most yellow flowers owe theirhue, is a solid substance, occurring in petals in small roundgranules called plastids. It is very widely distributed in sea-weeds, fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, and the higher plants, inautumn leaves and in fruits and seeds. It is insoluble in water,but readily soluble in ether. The yellow plastids of flowers arenot always round, but are sometimes angular as in the garden-nasturtium. In the tomato, asparagus, thorn-bush, and insome species of rose, the plastids of the fruit are spindle-formed,or irregular-shaped, and are fire-red, orange-red, or yellowishred. In yellow leaves the plastids are round; but in autumnalleaves they occur in irregular masses. The scarlet poppy, tulip, and fire-red canna owe their colors 228
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Fig. 105. Yellowish-green Flowers of Rock-Maple. Acer saccharum THE FLOWER AND THE BEE to a mixture of yellow plastids and red cell-sap. On the otherhand, dingy or dull colors result from a combination of violetsap with yellow granules. Carrotin is much less sensitive to theeffects of light than chlorophyll, as may be readily shown bythe following experiment: If the carrotin contained in a fewslices of carrot-root be dissolved out in ether, the yellow solu-tion will not lose its color under ten days, while the greenhue of a solution of chlorophyll will disappear in twenty-fourhours. Yellow was doubtless one of the first colors displayed by theflowers of the primitive flora; and, in view of the wide distribu-tion of yellow pigments in leaves, the development of yellowpetals offers little difficulty, and many leaves, fruits, andflowers afford suggestions as to the way in which this changemight take place. The quantity of yellow pigment in thefoliage of different plants varies greatly; w

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