At Ixtlán a real welcome awaited us. The judge came to escort us to the Municipal Palace, together with the mayor of the town. The former, being of a conservative, legal mind, carried an old-fashioned wooden-handled sixshooter, but the latter, as became the head of a City Booster's Association, had a gun ornamented in ivory and silver.

A FEAST OF FRIENDSHIP

There was a charming little plaza, with a bubbling fountain in the center, from which girls carried water in great brown pots, set upon their shoulders or on their heads, and into which one looked from the tiny porticoes that edged the Municipal Palace.

It was but one story deep and high, this palace, and had been burned by revolucionistas when they captured Ixtlán, some years ago.

"We have just rebuilt it," said the judge. "We are very proud."

They might well be proud. Their little fields and flocks keep them alive and no more, in these mountains. The mines, which once gave employment, have been closed. The fact that they were able to rebuild at all, and that they were willing to open their scanty purses for such a purpose, is proof of the quality of the Zapotecs.

They had prepared a little feast for me that night. "Just to show our friendship for the United States," they said.

Never did I enjoy a feast more than that served at Ixtlán. One guessed that the resources of the place had been strained to provide it. In these villages there is no restaurant or hotel, for the only travelers who come bring their own food and sleep in the plaza, in their own blankets.

when we began the march down the hill to Guelatao, headed by the dozen soldiers of the garrison. A band of seven pieces. marched ahead, and the little boys of the town followed, stumbling over the great rocks of the street, but bravely carrying aloft flags made of colored paper pasted in strips. The local dignitaries had managed to find sashes.

The schoolmaster, with his youngster aloft on his shoulder-a dapper, kindly, quick-spoken little man, with tiny hands and 'feet and a mass of black hair rising in a very fountain of curls-confided in his exotic English that his father had been an American and his mother French, and that he had been born in this village of Ixtlán. One wondered, vainly, what that romance could have been.

After flowers had been heaped at the foot of the little monument to the First Reformer, set in the tiny park which looks upon the site of the mud-walled, strawroofed hut in which he was born, and the local great men had had their prolonged say, it was the children's turn to declaim.

ZAPOTECS ARE FIGHTING FOR KNOWLEDGE

Then came the great event of the day. Revolucionistas had burned the school some years before, but by day's workwithout money to spend, without help this Indian community had rebuilt it. There had even been a new table made for the schoolmaster, who serves almost without pay, for in Mexico the teacher takes his reward in fair words and few and intermittent pesos.

The little ones of the school-roundfaced, grave, puzzled little Indians-sat on their bench at the end of the room while the children from the visiting schools filed in and presented them with flowers.

It was a touching, a charming little ceremony, but it was also significant. Other tribes may be content to live in illiteracy, but the Zapotecs are fighting for knowledge. They remember the prophecy that in this tribe will some day be found the savior of Mexico.

S ONE walks through garden, field, and forest and notes there the thousand and one forms of flowers the roses, peas, arrowheads, and lilies; the mallows, mustards, geraniums, pinks, and sumacs; the rushes, irises, myrtles, fireweeds, cacti, parsleys, and saxifrages; the heaths, primroses, gentians, phloxes, bluebells, honeysuckles, maples, and buckwheats; the sedges and orchids; the snapdragons and mints; the grasses and asters; wheat and ragweeds, walnuts and goose foots; and all their kith and kin—one wonders at the statement of the botanist that they all spring from one original flower, and that the Eve of this magnificently diverse race is the humble, simple, little buttercup (Color Plate I).

And yet, in their aspiration to fit themselves for diverse rôles in life and for existence in new environments, in their resolution to adjust themselves to the intensifying competitions in their world, they have assumed all of the vast variety of color, form, and quality known to the flower lover.

ALL FLOWERS ARE SISTERS "UNDER
THE SKIN"

Nor in doing so have they failed to write into their own beings, in characters which those who will take the pains to do so can read, the story of it all-a story which proclaims that whatever their differences of structure, of form, of color, of habit, and habitat-they are, like Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's lady, sisters under the skin.

In the garden varieties of roses, tulips, petunias, verbenas, and a host of other flowers this kinship is easily noted and readily traced. It is less obvious with different species of lilies, like the Turkscap and the Bermuda; it must be diligently sought in the differences between tulips, hyacinths, trilliums, onions, and Solomonseals, and proves highly elusive at first when sought among the buttercups, anemones, marsh marigolds, clematis, peonies, columbines, and larkspurs.

Environment works wonders on the fair faces, delicate tissues, and individual

forms of plant species. Waterlily, pondlily, and the fabled lotus of the Nile bear the mark of water in stem and floating leaf, and of a simple, tranquil mode of life in their many-petaled flowers.

Many of their cousins show the fashioning force of light, heat, and drought in root, stem, and leaf; the molding of bee or butterfly, the pull of gravity, and the breath of the south wind, in their flowers; and the effect of conveyance in their fruits.

Our present interest in tracing the family tree of the flowers is with the blossoms themselves. As one of the four organs of the plant the blossom has its own special work to do, and this, in turn, it apportions among its own four parts—its stamens, pistils, corolla, and calyx (see preceding page). In a sense it makes a general contract with the plant to make and deliver a certain number of good seeds, and sublets the four phases of the task to its several parts.

Of course, seed-making is impossible without pollen, and the task of the stamens is to deliver that. Nor can seed manufacture go on without the bodies that become seeds when fertilized by the pollen, and it is the job of the pistils to produce them.

But both stamen and pistil are rooted where they grow, and without pollenbearing messengers their work would be useless. It becomes, therefore, the job of the corolla to make itself into a delightfully designed, brightly colored poster, which announces the flower's full line of nectar and pollen to the busy bee and butterfly world.

The fourth member of the blossom's household is the calyx. Its main task is to stand guard over the delicate machinery within the bud, protecting it from the drying effect of weather and relieving the tedium of this task with incidental manufacture of starch.

WHICH WERE THE FIRST FLOWERS?

When one asks which were the first flowers and hence the oldest, the answer is, those that are least skillful in securing

the transfer of pollen and in the making of seeds, for in the world of flowers, as in the field of human industry, efficiency wins and archaic methods mark no prog

ress.

A large number of stamens means a high charge for transport in terms of pollen eaten or wasted, and a larger number of pistils means that many of them will fail of pollination.

By these tests of flower economy we find that the buttercup order, including buttercups, anemones, larkspurs, magnolias, and calycanthus, are the primitives of the floral world, and the snapdragons, lobelias, and orchids the most highly specialized. Among wind-pollinated flowers the most specialized are the latest arrivals on the field.

COUNTLESS GENERATIONS MARKED THE CLIMB OF BUTTERCUPS TO LILYHOOD

For a long time the buttercups must have remained uncertain as to the best plan for their blossoms. The calyx and corolla were the first to know their own mind and to settle upon their make-up. We see the vast majority of their descendant species fixing on five, four, or three sepals for the calyx, and the same numbers of petals for their corollas.

Progress was slower in the reduction of the number of stamens and pistils, and all of the members of the buttercup order, except a few highly specialized ones, have large numbers of both. For instance, the mousetail still produces hundreds of pistils, with the result that many of its seeds never ripen.

Presently the buttercups began to find their nectar diluted by rain and stolen by worthless marauders. A scale was provided as a roof for the nectar well, and later the petal itself became transformed into a nectar sack, as we may see in the columbines, larkspurs, and monkshoods.

Many flowers that made no bid for bee and butterfly patronage abolished nectaries and petals entirely. The wind could not be lured by color or sweets. But by hanging their anthers on long threads and making their stigmas plumelike, the pollen would be lifted away from the maturing anther by the wind and caught in the plumed stigma as it was carried by. So the meadowrue, clematis, and their ilk

came to divide their labors between two sets of flowers, one set having stamens and the other pistils.

Though the conversion of buttercups. into lilies must have taken innumerable generations marked by imperceptible changes, the actual number of steps by which this was wrought were not many. Indeed, the most striking characteristic of the flower of the lily even to-day is seen in some of the buttercups, the plan of three petals, sepals, etc.

The flowers of the arrowheads and waterplantains show no important differences from those of the buttercups, and, indeed, may be said to be buttercups that have become waders and lake dwellers, with a resulting change in their leaves and

stems.

Some of their descendants, growing tired of the placid, uneventful life of the water, ventured forth upon the land again. Those that had lost the corolla requisitioned a leaf, painted it in bright colors, and wrapped it around the naked flower for protection and attraction, and presto! we have the calla "lilies," Jack-in-thepulpits, and anthuriums.

Others enlarged the corolla, united the pistils, and presently became dayflowers and spiderworts, with a green calyx, blue or purple corolla, six stamens, and three pistils in one. It was no great step from these to the trilliums or wakerobins, the simplest members of the lily family.

The true lilies developed their beauty in answer to an evident need for greater publicity for their wares among the insect hosts. This they secured by coloring the green calyx like the corolla, so that the latter appears to have six petals instead of three (see Color Plates XXIX, XXX, and XXXI).

This "invention" proved so successful that all the insect-pollinated descendants, such as the snowdrops, daffodils, irises, and orchids exhibit it. Its effects are likewise observable in the wind-pollinated rushes, sedges, and grasses.

Once the lilies gained this development. they were so well satisfied with their flowers that they became conservatives, little given to radical changes. They made many departures in color, shape, and size, but in the fundamental organization of the blossom they have adhered so closely