Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/685

Rh poetic axiom holds. Every spring-time seems to teach us the same truism. The pines and other cone-bearing trees discharge their pollen or fertilizing matter in clouds. The winds, as Nature intends, sweep this pollen from their branches, on the "flowers" of which it has been produced. Carried through the air for miles, so much of the pollen cloud will fall on the receptive "cones," fertilize the ovules, and thus convert them into seeds, whence a new dynasty of trees may arise. But countless showers of pollen are spent in vain, irrecoverably lost, and sent abroad to no purpose whatever. They fall on barren ground; they litter the earth miles away from their parent trees, or cover the surface of lakes for miles with a yellow film—their purpose futile and their production vain. True it is, as the botanist will tell us, that more pollen must be produced in the case of wind-fertilized plants than is found in that of insect-impregnated flowers. It is a case of "hit or miss" with the wind-fertilized trees, while it is an illustration of an exact calculated aim with the flowers. Hence Nature has to provide for the contingency which awaits her efforts in the former instance by providing a very copious supply of pollen. She is in the position here, not of the marksman who takes deliberate aim at the bull's-eye with his rifle and single bullet. Contrariwise, she uses her Gatling gun or her mitrailleuse in the act of fertilizing the trees. She showers her bullets at the object in the hope that some of them will hit, and with the equally plain expectation that many must miss altogether. The whole process appears to be wasteful in the extreme, natural affairs notwithstanding, and the Tennysonian couplet is practically realized when the spectacle of tons of wasted pollen is beheld, discharged as these are at the mercy of any wind that blows, and sent into the air to accomplish hap-hazard what in other plants is often effected by deliberate and carefully calculated mechanism.

The notion that Nature possesses any system of economics at all might well be questioned by the observer who discerns the apparent waste through which many natural works and ways are carried out. But here, as in the case of so many other phases of life, the two sides of the medal must be carefully studied. It is not the case that Nature is uniformly neglectful of her resources, any more than it is correct to say that she is always saving or perennially economical. Circumstances alter cases in the phases of natural things as in human affairs, and we may readily enough discover that in several instances a very high degree of well-calculated prudence and foresight, speaking in ordinary terms, is exercised in the regulation of the universe of living and non-living things alike.

Take, as a broad example of the close adjustment of ways and means to appointed ends, the relationship between animals and green plants in the matter of their gaseous food. That the animal form demands for its due sustenance a supply of oxygen gas is, of course, a primary fact of elementary science. Without oxygen, animal life