the lime-tree as they do on the deep-blue gentian of the Alpine meadows or the red blossoms of the Weigelia, the dog-roses of our gardens or the yellow buttercups (_Ranunculus_) of our meadows; they despise nothing that yields them honey. But it certainly does not follow from this that the bees may not, under certain circumstances, have exercised a selecting influence upon the fixation and intensification of a new colour-variety of a flower. This is less a question of a _colour-preference_, in the human sense, on the part of the bees than of the _greater visibility_ of the colour in question in the environment peculiar to the flower, and of the amount of rivalry the bees meet with from other insects in regard to the same flower. In individual cases this would be difficult to demonstrate, especially since we can form only an approximate idea of the insect's power of seeing colour, and cannot judge what the colours of the individual blossoms count for in the mosaic picture of a flowery meadow. Yet this is the important point, for, as soon as the bees perceive one colour more readily than another, the preponderance of this colour-variety over other variations is assured, since it will be more frequently visited. In the same way we cannot guess in individual cases why one species of flower should exhale perfume while a nearly related species does not. But when we remember that many flowers adapted for the visits of dipterous insects possess a nauseous carrion-like smell, by means of which they not only attract flies but scare off other insects, we can readily imagine cases in which it was of importance to a flower to be able to be easily found by bees without betraying itself by its pleasant fragrance to other less desirable visitors. Thus, therefore, we can understand the odourless but intensely blue species of gentian, if we may assume that its blue colour is more visible to bees than to other insects. If I were to elaborate in detail all the principles which here suggest themselves to me I should require to write a complete section, and I am unwilling to do this until I can bring forward a much larger number of new observations than I am at present in a position to do. All I wish to do here is to exhort doubters to modesty, and to remind them that these matters are exceedingly complex, and that we should be glad and grateful that expert observers like Darwin and Hermann Müller have given us some insight into the principles interconnecting the facts, instead of imagining whenever we meet with some little apparently contradictory fact, which may indeed be quite correct in itself, that the whole theory of the development of flowers through insects has been overthrown. Let us rather endeavour to understand such facts, and to arrange them in their places as stones of the new building.