Excerpt from Our Country's Flowers and How to Know Them: Being a Complete Guide to the Flowers and Ferns of Britain To explain this a little more fully, we may take, for example, the family Ranunculaceae, the first in classification and with which the beginner will probably be first acquainted. A Buttercup has a flower with the petals widely spreading; so that it has been observed to be visited by more than sixty species of insects. Hence the pistils of the flowers on any plant can be easily fertilized by the pollen derived from those of another plant. It is thus adapted to insects and can be crossed. It may consequently be called an insect-fertilized flower. As, however, the stigmas are mature simultaneously with the anthers of at least some of its stamens, it can easily be self fertilized in the absence of insect visitors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.