Tropical nature, and other essaysWallace, Alfred Russel
History
Tropical nature, and other essays
Wallace, Alfred Russel
Ecology -- Tropics; Natural history -- Tropics; Tropics
For details of these adaptations we must refer the
reader to the works of Darwin, Lubbock, Hermann Müller, and others.
We have here only to deal with the part played by colour, and by
those floral structures in which colour is most displayed.
_Attractive Odours in Flowers._--The sweet odours of flowers, like
their colours, seem often to have been developed as an attraction
or guide to insect fertilizers, and the two phenomena are often
complementary to each other. Thus, many inconspicuous flowers--like
the mignonette and the sweet-violet, can be distinguished by their
odours before they attract the eye, and this may often prevent
their being passed unnoticed; while very showy flowers, and
especially those with variegated or spotted petals, are seldom
sweet. White, or very pale flowers, on the other hand, are often
excessively sweet, as exemplified by the jasmine and clematis; and
many of these are only scented at night, as is strikingly the case
with the night-smelling stock, our butterfly orchids (_Habenaria
chlorantha_), the greenish-yellow _Daphne pontica_, and many others.
These white flowers are mostly fertilized by night-flying moths;
and those which reserve their odours for the evening probably
escape the visits of diurnal insects, which would consume their
nectar without effecting fertilization. The absence of odour in
showy flowers, and its preponderance among those that are white,
may be shown to be a fact by an examination of the lists in Mr.
Mongredien’s work on hardy trees and shrubs.[22] He gives a list
of about 160 species with showy flowers, and another list of sixty
species with fragrant flowers: but only twenty of these latter are
included among the showy species, and these are almost all white
flowered. Of the sixty species with fragrant flowers, more than
forty are white, and a number of others have greenish, yellowish,
or dusky and inconspicuous flowers. The relation of white flowers
to nocturnal insects is also well shown by those which, like the
evening primroses, only open their large white blossoms after sunset.
The red Martagon lily has been observed by Mr. Hermann Müller to
be fertilized by the humming-bird hawk moth, which flies in the
morning and afternoon when the colours of this flower, exposed to
the nearly horizontal rays of the sun, glow with brilliancy, and
when it also becomes very sweet-scented.
[22] _Trees and Shrubs for English Plantations_, by Augustus
Mongredien. Murray, 1870.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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