Crossword-Solution: POLLINIA 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 10

The pollen, or more correctly, the pollen-tetrads, remain fastened together as club-shaped pollinia usually borne on a slender pedicel.

The species known as Catasetum tridentatum has pollinia with very large viscid discs; on touching one of the two filaments (antennae) which occur on the gynostemium of the flower the pollinia are shot out to a fairly long distance (as far as 1 metre) and in such manner that they alight on the back of the insect, where they are held.

The anthers have only rudimentary pollinia and do not open; there are no antennae, but on the other hand numerous seeds are produced.

With respect to the former, he says: “The explanation of their _origin_ is deemed thoroughly unsatisfactory—utterly insufficient to explain the incipient, infinitesimal beginnings of structures which are of utility only when they are considerably developed.” As I have fully treated this subject in another work, I will here give only a few details on one alone of the most striking peculiarities of the flowers of orchids, namely, their pollinia.

With the pollinia of orchids, the threads which originally served to tie together the pollen-grains, can be traced cohering into caudicles; and the steps can likewise be followed by which viscid matter, such as that secreted by the stigmas of ordinary flowers, and still subserving nearly but not quite the same purpose, became attached to the free ends of the caudicles—all these gradations being of manifest benefit to the plants in question.