Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/193

Rh in it he can not disengage himself, and there perishes wretchedly, like a hawk in a keeper's trap.

These cases lead on naturally to certain other very queer flowers which similarly take advantage of the stupidity of flies by actually imprisoning them (without writ of habeas corpus) in a strong inner chamber, until they have duly performed the penal servitude of fertilization enjoined upon them by the inexorable blossom. The South European birthwort, a very lurid-looking and fly-enticing flower, has a sort of cornucopia-shaped tube, lined with long hairs, which all point inward, and so allow small midges to creep down readily enough, after the fashion of an eel-buck or lobster-pot. Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras—to get out again is the great difficulty. Try as they will, the little prisoners can't crawl back upward against the downward-pointing hairs. Accordingly, they are forced, by circumstances over which they have no control, to walk aimlessly up and down their prison-yard, fertilizing the little knobby surface of the seed-vessel with pollen brought from another flower. But, as soon as the seeds are all impregnated, the stamens begin to shed their pollen, and dust over the gnats with the copious powder. Then the hairs all wither up, and the gnats, released from their lobster-pot prison, fly away once more on the same fool's errand. Before doing so, however, they make a good meal off the pollen that covers the floor, though they still carry away a great many grains on their own wings and bodies. One might imagine that, after a single experience of the sort, the midges would have sense enough to avoid birthwort in future"; but your midge has really no more intelligence than your human drunkard, or gambler, or opium-eater. He flies straight off to the very next birthwort he sees, conveys to it the pollen from the last trap he visited, and gets confined once more in the inner chamber, till the plant is prepared to let him out again on ticket-of leave of short duration. Thus, like an habitual criminal, he spends almost all his time in getting from one jail into another. His confinement, however, is not solitary, but is mitigated by congenial intercourse with the ladies and gentlemen of his own kind.

A very similar but much larger fly-cage is set by our own common wild arum, or cuckoo-pint. This familiar big spring flower exhales a, disagreeable, fleshy odor, which, by its meat-like flavor, attracts a tiny midge with beautiful iridescent wings and a very poetical name, Psychoda. As in most other cases where flies are specially invited, the color of the cuckoo-pint is usually a dull and somewhat livid purple. A palisade of hairs closes the neck of the funnel-shaped blossom, and repeats the lobster-pot tactics of the entirely unconnected South European birthwort. The little flies, entering by this narrow and stockaded door, fertilize the future red berries with pollen brought from their last prison, and are then rewarded for their pains by a tiny drop of honey, which slowly oozes from the middle of each embryo