The general principle which this strange flower illustrates in so striking a fashion is just this. Most common flowers have laid themselves out to attract bees, and so a bee flower forms our human ideal of central typical blossom: it looks, in short, we think, as a flower ought to look. But there are some originally minded and eccentric plants which have struck out a line for themselves, and taken to attracting sundry casual flies, wasps, midges, beetles, snails, or even birds, which take the place of bees as their regular fertilizers; and it is these Bohemians of the vegetable world that make up what we all consider as the queerest and most singular of all flowers. They adapt their appearance and structure to the particular tastes and habits of their chosen guests. Most of the flowers specially affected by carrion flies have a lurid red color and a distinct smell of bad meat. Few of them, however, are quite so cruel in their habits as Rafflesia. For the most part, they attract the insects by their appearance and odor, but reward their services with a little honey and other allurements. This is the case with the curious English fly-orchid, whose dull purple lip is covered with tiny drops of nectar, licked off by the fertilizing flies. The very malodorous carrion-flowers (or stapelias) are visited by blue-bottles and flesh-flies, while an allied form actually sets a trap for the fly’s proboscis, which catches the insect by its hairs, and compels him to give a sharp pull in order to free himself: this pull dislodges the pollen, and so secures cross-fertilization. The Alpine butterwort sets a somewhat similar gin so vigorously that when a weak fly is caught in it he can not disengage himself, and there perishes wretchedly, like a hawk in a keeper’s trap. The south European birthwort, a very lurid-looking and fly-enticing flower, has a sort of cornucopia-shaped tube, lined with long hairs, which all point inward, and so allow small midges to creep down readily enough, after the fashion of an eel-buck or lobster-pot. “Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras”--to get out again is the great difficulty. Try as they will, the little prisoners can not crawl back upward against the downward-pointing hairs. Accordingly, they are forced by circumstances over which they have no control to walk aimlessly up and down their prison yard, fertilizing the little knobby surface of the seed-vessel from another flower. But as soon as the seeds are all impregnated, the stamens begin to shed their pollen, and dust over the gnats with copious powder. Then the hairs all wither up, and the gnats, released from their lobster-pot prison, fly away once more on the same fool’s errand. Before doing so, however, they make a good meal off the pollen that covers the floor, though they still carry away a great many grains on their own wings and bodies.