then, but only then, the flower begins to wither and up its now wrinkled sides the pollen-laden prisoner can at last crawl to liberty. There appears nothing very romantic about the cross-fertilization of the Dutchman’s pipe, in fact, the whole affair seems but a sordid and, it must be confessed, a very efficient trick to get what the flower needs from the insect, rewarding it by many hours of apparently hopeless captivity. But most flowers do have something that insects want, and none so well fulfill the expectations of butterflies as the meadow pink. This is a graceful little perennial native in the fields in central Europe, but often grown in American flower gardens. It has beautiful pink flowers, with a long tubular calyx, at the bottom of which are rich honey glands, accessible only to the long proboscis of different kinds of butterflies. No other insects, and many try, are able to get the honey from this plant. It begins flowering by opening its five beautifully fringed petals, all of which are marked with lines from their edge toward the center. These obvious “pathfinders” are common on many other flowers and all seem to be there to act as a guide for alighting insects, and, as it were, steer them to the center of the flower. As a butterfly alights he finds five protruding anthers covered with pollen. These are of no use to him, but nevertheless his head is covered by their pollen. In fact, many other visitors, who can never reach the honey, find the bright color and good stocks of pollen sufficient attraction for them, and after a pollen feast fly off to other flowers. If the butterfly comes at this state of the flower’s life, it pokes its long proboscis down into the tube of the calyx, but finds the passage almost blocked by another set of five stamens not yet ready to discharge pollen, and, as though ashamed of the fact, quite hidden from view. Also, the proboscis is very nearly stopped by the style, which, if its stigmas were ready for mating, would then and there become impregnated. But they are rolled together into a tight spiral, and their pollen-receptive faces tightly pressed together in addition to the whole structure being twisted, so that the very probably pollen-laden proboscis of the butterfly finally gets to the honey without leaving one grain of pollen where it could possibly self-fertilize the flower. Honey-laden, it now flies away, and so far as this particular flower is concerned, simply nothing has happened but to coat several insects with pollen. A little later the anthers of the first set of stamens cease work and drop off. Then the five stamens hitherto hidden in the calyx burst out and furnish a second crop of pollen, but the stigmas are still safely coiled away from the possible danger of self-impregnation. During this second stage the flower may repeatedly be visited, but until this second crop of anthers become useless there is not the slightest risk of the stigmas becoming self-fertilized.