But, again, take the grasses, which depend for fertilization exclusively on the wind, and have no need to woo the visits of the insects. The beauty of the markings of the inflorescence of many of the grasses is very great, though far from conspicuous: take the delicately banded flowers of our quaking grasses; take the rich crimson of the foxtails; take the brilliant yellow of the Canary _Phaleris_; and it is impossible to refuse the attribute of beauty in colour to the wind-loving grasses. And all this beauty is unexplained on the theory in question. It is impossible to speak of the grasses and not to have the mind recalled to the beauty that resides in form as contrasted with colour. Elegance, grace of form, characterizes most (but not all) plants, whether fertilized by the wind or by insects; and yet this grace, in many cases, perhaps in most, adds nothing to their conspicuousness. It is, on the theory in question, a piece of idle beauty; and yet it is all-pervading--a persistent, though not universal, characteristic of the vegetable world. But to revert to conspicuousness. It is not true to say that all self-fertilized plants have inconspicuous flowers. I have adduced the _Stephanotis_ and _Hoya_ on this point. Nor is it true to say that all anemophilous flowers are inconspicuous as compared with the green of their leaves. The large but delicate yellow groups of the male flowers of the Scotch pine (not to travel beyond very familiar plants) are very conspicuous in the early summer--much more so, to my eye at least, than many flowers which are supposed to stake their lives on attraction by being conspicuous. Hermann Müller has observed on this same fact, and considers it to be clear that the display of colour can be of no use to the plant, and must therefore be regarded as "a merely accidental phenomenon,"[21]--_i.e._, a phenomenon not accounted for by utility. The crimson flowers of the larch, again, are certainly very conspicuous as well as beautiful on the yet leafless boughs; and yet they owe nothing to insects. One other remark must be made on this passage from Mr. Darwin which has formed my text. It does not pretend to account for the production of beauty or even of conspicuousness. It only seeks to account for the accumulation of that quality in certain plants, and its comparative absence in others. The tendency in Nature to produce beauty is a postulate in Mr. Darwin's theory.