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| Water-Lilies: Past and Present |
The flowering aquatic plants to which most of us refer collectively as
water-lilies were among the first splashes of beauty that man noticed
on this earth. Earlier plant forms there were in profusion, but the process of evolution seems to have favored water-lilies with quick
development to their ultimate form. Remains of tropical water-lilies have been
found in pre-Ice Age stratas in Europe, and these remains show the
early types to have been of the same basic form that persists among
tropical species today.
The dimmest beginnings of art and writing include the water-lily as
well as closely related members of the botanical family. To the furled
sepals of the lotus bud, historians trace the design of the Ionic capital
and the basic pattern of the Greek fret or meander. Doubled, the meander forms the swastika, certainly one of man's earliest written
symbols, representing good and evil in one part of the world, darkness and
light in another, life and death, male and female, peace and conflict
to the peoples of the world. The cornucopia, that universal and ancient
symbol of fertility and abundance, is thought by some scholars to have
been derived from the filled-to-bursting seed pods of the lotus, which
it resembles.
The Family Tree
The family tree of the water-lilies is confusing, made so principally
by a score of early plant anatomists, horticulturists, and botanists, each
of whom bent it this way and that to satisfy his personal bias in classification.
Division, Class, and Order
The basic lineage of water-lilies is fairly obvious, however. In the
four great divisions of the vegetable kingdom, they fall under the largest of all, Spermatophyta, the flowering plants, and then into one of
the two subdivisions, the Angiospermae, plants that reproduce through
seeds fertilized within a closed ovary.
Under one of two classes encompassed by the subdivision, water-lilies are listed with the Dicotyledoneae, plants whose sprouting seeds
are fed by food stored in two fleshy, leaflike appendages or cotyledons.
Further, in a subclass of the Dicotyledoneae, they are listed with the
Archichlamydeae, flowering plants which bear their petals separately.
Then they fall into the order of Ranales, a classification based on the
manner of placement of the petals on the stem. Other plant families in
this order are buttercups and magnolias, whose blooms to the imaginative observer show a certain structural resemblance to those of
water-lilies.
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