Page:Darwin - The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilized by insects (1877).djvu/58

38 dicates that moths do not go to work in a quite senseless manner.

Nature may be said to have tried this same experiment, but not quite fairly; for Orchis pyramidalis, as shown by Mr. Bentham, often produces monstrous flowers without a nectary, or with a short and imperfect one. Sir C. Lyell sent me several spikes from Folkestone with many flowers in this condition: I found six without a vestige of a nectary, and their pollinia had not been removed. In about a dozen other flowers, having either short nectaries, or with the labellum imperfect, the guiding ridges being either absent or developed in excess and rendered foliaceous, the pollinia in one alone had been removed, and the ovarium of another flower was swelling. Yet I found that the saddle-formed discs in these eighteen flowers were perfect, and that they readily clasped a needle when inserted in the proper place. Moths had removed the pollinia, and had thoroughly fertilised the perfect flowers on the same spikes; so that they must have neglected the monstrous flowers, or, if visiting them, the derangement in the complex mechanism of the parts had hindered the removement of the pollinia, and prevented their fertilisation.

Notwithstanding these several facts I still suspected that nectar must be secreted by our common Orchids,