The common eelgrass or tapegrass is a submerged aquatic which roots in the mud and has long grasslike leaves which may often be seen waving gently in the current of many quiet streams in this country and in Europe. Down near the base and in among its swaying verdure, it bears tiny flowers which have no petals, and in which, as if recognizing the futility of display in such a secluded watery home, even its calyx is reduced to small scales. Some of these minute flowers are females, others again all males, and as they appear in their early stages it looks as though never the twain could meet. And the hopelessness of their ever meeting is increased as the maturing female begins slowly to uncoil the fine stalk upon which it grows. Steadily but surely the loose spirals of the stalk of this ever more mature female flower uncoils, until, when quite ready for the pollen, it is at last upon the surface. The male flowers, in the meanwhile, are down near the bottom with their small freight of pollen ready to perform their function, but firmly anchored to a stalk absurdly inadequate to reach the surface where alone they can be of service. A great Belgian, Maurice Maeterlinck, who studied this plant with more sympathetic vision than any botanist has yet been able to equal, wrote in one of his essays on “The Intelligence of Flowers” the solution of this little drama of apparent hopelessness. No other words can ever convey the meaning of what happens to the eelgrass quite so well as his. “Is there any more cruel inadvertence or ordeal in nature? Picture the tragedy of that longing, the inaccessible so nearly attained, the transparent fatality, the impossible with not a visible obstacle! It would be insoluble, like our own tragedy upon this earth, were it not that an unexpected element is mingled with it. Did the males foresee the disillusion to which they would be subjected? One thing is certain: that they have locked up in their hearts a bubble of air, even as we lock up in our souls a thought of desperate deliverance. It is as though they hesitated for a moment; then, with a magnificent effort, the finest, the most supernatural, that I know of in all the pageantry of the insects and the flowers, in order to rise to happiness, they deliberately break the bond that attaches them to life. They tear themselves from their peduncle, and, with an incomparable flight * * * dart up and break the surface of the water. Wounded to death, but radiant and free, they float for a moment beside their heedless brides and the union is accomplished, whereupon the victims drift away to perish, while the wife, already a mother, closes her calyx, in which lives their last breath, rolls up her spiral, and descends to the depths, there to ripen the fruit of the heroic kiss.”