Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/149

Rh But there are floral odors as well as colors which are offensive. We do not understand the laws of odor so well as those of sound and color. We educate the eye and the ear, but in the nose we are still cave-men. If we can trust a savant who has spent years in the cultivation of his olfactories, odors are under the same law as sounds and colors. Certain odors blend into a sort of music of smells as certain notes into a music of sounds. Other odors refuse to blend, but jar on the nose like discordant sounds on the ear. Septimius Piesse must live in a world of harsh notes and grating discords. Even to us the account seems nearly balanced between the odorous and the mal-odorous. The wild-rose is sweet, but the datura is sickening. The ailantus may be scored against the pink, and against the jasmine, the queen of flowers, whose fragrance is the only secret the floral world withholds from our chemistries—against the jasmine may be scored the carrion-flower. The odor of the flower is what its name implies. Surely it was not given for man's pleasure. Then for what? Perhaps from this very flower we may learn the rationale of odors.

The flower of the carrion-plant is of a pale yellow-green and is altogether inconspicuous. If it had no attraction but its color, it would never win the attention of an insect. Now, it is a fact of great significance that this carrion-flower is fertilized by the blow-fly. But what does the blow-fly want of a flower? If this flower were sensitive and rational and skilled in chemistries, we might imagine the correlation between itself and the fly to be the result of a mental process something like this: "At any cost I must secure fertilization. The wind cannot serve me, and bees and butterflies cannot find me. I will invite the blow-fly—I will practise deception. I will smell like decaying flesh!" Of course, this is fanciful. Suppose we imagine an intelligence outside of the plant, and the insect arranging by special creation such correlations between color, odor, nectary, and bees, moths, flies, and butterflies. Does it bring us any nearer to a mental resting-place? Rather, do not questions without end start up in the mind? Why such indirection? Why such seeming design marred by seeming chance as in the iris? And if all these structures and colors and odors are the result of special creation, what shall we say of deadly nightshades? of poison-ivies? of the fungi which live on the human body? Was there a special provision for certain fungi to grow on the forehead? for others to thrive in the mouth? for others still to infest the stomach? Was the body of man designed to be the habitat of pain-giving parasites? We have found plants good and not good, beautiful and not beautiful, odorous and mal-odorous. If the world were a theophany, would it not be good only, good everywhere and equally? To interpret the vegetal world as a "special creation" no more satisfies the religious sentiment than the reason.

Our common loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia) is one of the most variable of species. Its European representative (L. vulgaris)