Wild Flowers / Natures Garden | Page 4

flowers, bees, butterflies, moths or humming birds about others, each visitor choosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinite pains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly are pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitious flowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreeding through fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove the operation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they send seeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studied with profit by Anglo-Saxon expansionists. Do vice and virtue exist side by side in the vegetable world also? Yes, and every sinner is branded as surely as was Cain. The dodder, Indian pipe, broomrape and beech-drops wear the floral equivalent of the striped suit and the shaved head. Although claiming most respectable and exalted kinsfolk, they are degenerates not far above the fungi. In short, this is a universe that we live in; and all that share the One Life are one in essence, for natural law is spiritual law. "Through Nature to God," flowers show a way to the scientist lacking faith.
Although it has been stated by evolutionists for many years that in order to know the flowers, their insect relationships must first be understood, it is believed that "Nature's Garden" is the first American work to explain them in any considerable number of species. Dr. Asa Gray, William Hamilton Gibson, Clarence Moores Weed, and Miss Maud Going in their delightful books or lectures have shown the interdependence of a score or more of different blossoms and their insect visitors. Hidden away in the proceedings of scientific societies' technical papers are the invaluable observations of such men as Dr. William Trelease of Wisconsin and Professor Charles Robertson of Illinois. To the latter especially, I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness. Sprengel, Darwin, Muller, Delpino, and Lubbock, among others, have given the world classical volumes on European flora only, but showing a vast array of facts which the theory of adaptation to insects alone correlates and explains. That the results of illumining researches should be so slow in enlightening the popular mind can be due only to the technical, scientific language used in setting them forth, language as foreign to the average reader as Chinese, and not to be deciphered by the average student either, without the help of a glossary. These writings, as well as the vast array of popular books - too many for individual mention - have been freely consulted after studies made afield.
To Sprengel belongs the glory of first exalting flowers above the level of botanical specimens. After studying the wild geranium he became convinced, as he wrote in 1787, that "the wise Author of Nature has not made even a single hair without a definite design. A hundred years before, one, Nehemias Grew, had said that it was necessary for pollen to reach the stigma of a flower in order that it might set fertile seed, and Linnaeus bad to come to his rescue with conclusive evidence to convince a doubting world that he was right. Sprengel made the next step forward, but his writings lay neglected over seventy years because he advanced the then incredible and only partially true statement that a flower is fertilized by insects which carry its pollen from its anthers to its stigma. In spite of his discoveries that the hairs within the wild geranium protect its nectar from rain for the insect benefactor's benefit; that most flowers which secrete nectar have what he termed "honey guides" - spots of bright color, heavy veining, or some such pathfinder for the visitor on the petals; that sometimes the male flowers, the staminate ones, are separated from the seed-bearing or pistillate ones on distinct plants, he left it to Darwin to show that cross-fertilization by insects, the transfer of pollen from one blossom to another - not from anthers to stigma of the same flower - is the great end to which so much marvelous floral mechanism is adapted. The wind is a wasteful, uncertain pollen distributor. Insects transfer it more economically, especially the more highly organized and industrious ones. In a few instances hummingbirds, as well, unwittingly do the flower's bidding while they feast now here, now there. In spite of Sprengel's most patient and scientific research, that shed great light on the theory of natural selection a half century before Darwin advanced it, he never knew that flowers are nearly always sterile to pollen of another species when carried to them on the bodies of insect visitors, or that cross-pollenized blossoms defeat the self-pollinated ones in the struggle for survival. These facts Darwin proved in endless experiments.
Because bees depend absolutely upon flowers, not only for their own food but for that of future generations for whom