Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/346

334 shown that plants produced from the pollen of one flower applied to the pistil of another are stronger and more vigorous than plants produced from the stamens and ovules of a single blossom. It was to obtain the benefit of this cross-fertilization in a simple form that flowers first began to exist; their subsequent development depends upon the further extension of the same principle.

The pines and other conifers, the grasses and sedges, and the forest-trees, for the most part depend upon the wind to waft the pollen of one blossom to the pistil of the next. Hence their flowers generally protrude in great hanging masses, so that the breeze may easily carry off the pollen, and that the pistils may stand a fair chance of catching any passing grain. Flowers of some such types as these were doubtless the earliest of all to be evolved, and their colors are always either green or plain brown.

But wind-fertilization is very wasteful. Pollen is an expensive product to the plant, requiring much useful material for its manufacture; and yet it has to be turned loose in immense quantities on the chance that a stray grain here and there may light upon a pistil ready for its reception. It is almost as though the American farmers were to throw their corn into the Atlantic in hopes that a bushel or two might happen to be washed ashore in England by the waves and the Gulf Stream. Under such circumstances, a ship becomes of immense importance; and Nature has provided just such ships, ready-made for the very work that was crying out to them. These ships were the yet undifferentiated insects, whose descendants were to grow into bees, rose-beetles, and butterflies.

Already, in the carboniferous world, winged insects had begun to exist. Some of these must soon have taken to feeding among the hanging blossoms of the first flowering plants. Insects are fond of the soft and nutritious pollen; and it would seem at first sight as though they could therefore be only enemies to the plants which they visited. But, as they went from flower to flower in search of food, they would carry pollen from one to the other, clinging to their heads, feet, or legs; and so would unconsciously aid in fertilizing the blossoms. Though some of the pollen would thus be eaten up, yet the saving effected by the substitution of the insect as a ship, for the old wasteful mode of dispersal by the wind, would more than compensate for the loss thus brought about. Accordingly, it would naturally happen that those flowers which most specialized themselves for fertilization by means of insects, would gain a considerable advantage over their neighbors in the struggle for existence. For this purpose, their outer leaves ought to assume a cup-like shape, instead of the open clusters of the wind-fertilized type; and their form should be directed rather to saving the pollen than to exposing it; while their efforts must chiefly be expended in attracting the insects whose visits would benefit them, and repelling all others. Those flowers which