Wild Flowers: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect VisitorsBlanchan, Neltje
Science
Wild Flowers: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors
Blanchan, Neltje
Wild flowers -- North America
Do you doubt it? Then study the mechanism of one of our common
orchids or milkweeds that are adjusted with such marvelous
delicacy to the length of a bee's tongue or of a butterfly's leg;
learn why so many flowers have sticky calices or protective
hairs; why the skunk cabbage, purple trillium, and carrion flower
emit a fetid odor while other flowers, especially the white or
pale yellow night bloomers, charm with their delicious breath;
see if you cannot discover why the immigrant daisy already
whitens our fields with descendants as numerous as the sands of
the seashore, whereas you may tramp a whole day without finding a
single native ladies' slipper. What of the sundew that not only
catches insects, but secretes gastric juice to digest them? What
of the bladderwort, in whose inflated traps tiny crustaceans are
imprisoned, or the pitcher plant, that makes soup of its guests?
Why are gnats and flies seen about certain flowers, bees,
butterflies, moths or humming birds about others, each visitor
choosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinite
pains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly
are pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitious
flowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreeding
through fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove the
operation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they send
seeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studied
with profit by Anglo-Saxon expansionists. Do vice and virtue
exist side by side in the vegetable world also? Yes, and every
sinner is branded as surely as was Cain. The dodder, Indian pipe,
broomrape and beech-drops wear the floral equivalent of the
striped suit and the shaved head. Although claiming most
respectable and exalted kinsfolk, they are degenerates not far
above the fungi. In short, this is a universe that we live in;
and all that share the One Life are one in essence, for natural
law is spiritual law. "Through Nature to God," flowers show a way
to the scientist lacking faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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