For the hole through which the second set of stamens has come is so small that still only the proboscis of the butterfly can penetrate it. When finally the second crop of anthers also fall off, then the style slowly uncoils and thrusts its now receptive stigmas above the calyx and in plain view of passing visitors. These come, pollen-laden of course, from other flowers, and cross-fertilization is assured. Here the flower furnishes two crops of pollen, plentiful supplies of honey, and asks only that in gathering these the butterflies see to it that its stigma be covered only with foreign pollen. Keeping carefully out of the way while they are about their business and there is danger of self-fertilization, they come out boldly once that danger is past. In this meadow pink self-fertilization is simply impossible; everything in the production of its young it owes to the butterflies, to which it surely makes adequate returns. While such plants as the meadow pink and thousands of others have lost, if they ever possessed, the power of self-fertilization, and rely absolutely on insect visitors for their perpetuation, there are many hundreds of kinds that apparently hope for cross-fertilization, but, in default of it, due to their inability to absolutely compel it, they finally accept self-fertilization as a last resort. Darwin once said that “Nature abhors perpetual self-fertilization,” and the frequent visits of insects and their rôle in preventing it, together with the flowers’ adaptations to such visits, support the contention, which has never been seriously questioned. But some flowers appear to have left the back door open, as it were, so that failing cross-fertilization, they may still rely upon self-fertilization. A geranium from the Pyrenees, a relative of our common woods geranium, is of this type. A day or two before its stigmas are ripe it produces first one set of five anthers, all pollen-coated, and then another. If these have not been brushed clean, as often or usually happens, then the stigmas ripen and, of course, are impregnated by their pollen. If they are brushed clean of pollen, then the stigmas must rely on foreign pollen, of which it is assured a supply from the visits of pollen-laden insects from other flowers, which are still attracted by the flowers’ color and honey. Perpetuation is assured, in any case, but the preference is still for cross-fertilization.