Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/190

178, while engaged in their usual business of gathering honey all the day from every opening flower. But Rafflesia, on the contrary, has positively acquired a fallacious external resemblance to raw meat, and a decidedly high flavor, on purpose to take in the too trustful Sumatran flies. When a fly sights and scents one, he (or rather she) proceeds at once to settle in the cup, and there lay a number of eggs in what it naturally regards as a very fine decaying carcass. Then, having dusted itself over in the process with plenty of pollen from this first flower, it flies away confidingly to the next promising bud, in search both of food for itself and of a fitting nursery for its future little ones. In doing so, it of course fertilizes all the blossoms that it visits, one after another, by dusting them successively with one another's pollen. When the young grubs are hatched out, however, they discover the base deception all too late, and perish miserably in their fallacious bed, the helpless victims of misplaced parental confidence. Even as Zeuxis deceived the very birds with his painted grapes, so Rafflesia deceives the flies themselves by its ingenious mimicry of a putrid beefsteak. In the fierce competition of tropical life, it has found out by simple experience that dishonesty is the best policy.

The general principle which this strange flower illustrates in so. striking a fashion is just this: Most common flowers have laid themselves out to attract bees, and so a bee-flower forms our human ideal of a central typical blossom: it looks, in short, we think, as a flower ought to look. But there are some originally minded and eccentric plants which have struck out a line for themselves, and taken to attracting sundry casual flies, wasps, midges, beetles, snails, or even birds, which take the place of bees as their regular fertilizers; and it is these Bohemians of the vegetable world that make up what we all consider as the queerest and most singular of all flowers. They adapt their appearance and structure to the particular tastes and habits of their chosen guests.

Now, the fact is, we are all a little tired of that prig and Aristides among insects, the little busy bee. We have heard his virtues praised by poets, moralists, and men of science, till we are all burning to ostracize him forthwith, for the sake of never more hearing him called industrious and intelligent. He and his self-righteous cousin, the ant, are in fact a pair of egregious Pharisaical humbugs, who have made a virtue of their own excessive acquisitiveness, and have induced Solomon, Virgil, Dr. Watts, and other misguided human beings to acquiesce far too readily in their preposterous claims. For my own part, I never was more pleased in my life than when Sir John Lubbock conclusively proved by experiment that they were both extremely stupid and uninventive insects, with scarcely a faint glimmering of brotherly love or any other good ethical quality. I propose, therefore, in this present paper, to leave the too-much-belauded bee, with the flowers that cater for his tastes, entirely out of consideration, and look only