[Illustration: Fig. 74. Single stamen from Tulip flower; A, anthers, or pollen sacs; F, filament, or stalk of stamen.]
[Illustration: Fig. 75. Flower of Tulip laid open, showing the three-cornered central green box containing the young seeds.]
~Now we have come to the heart of the flower, and find there the most important thing in it.~ Examine a sweet pea, for example, and you will find in the middle of the flower a tiny green structure very like a pea pod, with a little sticky knob at the tip. In the heart of a tulip you will find a long green box with a sticky, three-cornered knob at the top (fig. 75), while in a buttercup there are a number of these structures instead of one (~see~ fig. 76 ~s~), each of which has very much the appearance of a little pea-pod. Open the pea-pod, or the box of the tulip, and you will find within it a number of very small balls of a clear green colour. These are the young structures which will become seeds when they are older, and they are the most important things in the flower. The green box which protects them is called the ~carpel~ in the case of the pea-pod, where there is one space in it. In the tulip you will find that the box is divided into three compartments, and each of these is called a carpel (~see~ fig. 77). You may think of the tulip carpels as being the same thing as three pea-pods joined very tightly together. Some flowers have only one carpel; others have three or five joined up like those of the tulip, while others like those of the buttercup have a very large number of single separate carpels.
[Illustration: Fig. 76. Buttercup flower laid open, showing that there are many seed-boxes (~s~) in the centre of the flower. R, the receptacle is the swollen end of the flower stalk.]
[Illustration: Fig. 77. Carpels of the Tulip cut open to show that there are three spaces with seeds, each division representing a single carpel.]
In the pea, tulip, buttercup, and many others, the carpels are in the centre of the flower, above the petals, and attached to the swollen end of the flower stalk, which is called the ~receptacle~, as in fig. 76 R. Other flowers have the receptacle hollowed out like a cup or goblet, and the carpels sunk right in it. When this is the case, we generally find that the sepals and petals lie above the carpels and not below them, as in fig. 78. This is also the case in the rose, where in fig. 70 flower B shows clearly the swollen part below the bud, which is the hollowed receptacle containing the carpels, and the same is true of the harebell (~see~ fig. 69) and many flowers.