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
Although it has been stated by evolutionists for many years that
in order to know the flowers, their insect relationships must
first be understood, it is believed that "Nature's Garden" is the
first American work to explain them in any considerable number of
species. Dr. Asa Gray, William Hamilton Gibson, Clarence Moores
Weed, and Miss Maud Going in their delightful books or lectures
have shown the interdependence of a score or more of different
blossoms and their insect visitors. Hidden away in the
proceedings of scientific societies' technical papers are the
invaluable observations of such men as Dr. William Trelease of
Wisconsin and Professor Charles Robertson of Illinois. To the
latter especially, I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness.
Sprengel, Darwin, Muller, Delpino, and Lubbock, among others,
have given the world classical volumes on European flora only,
but showing a vast array of facts which the theory of adaptation
to insects alone correlates and explains. That the results of
illumining researches should be so slow in enlightening the
popular mind can be due only to the technical, scientific
language used in setting them forth, language as foreign to the
average reader as Chinese, and not to be deciphered by the
average student either, without the help of a glossary. These
writings, as well as the vast array of popular books - too many
for individual mention - have been freely consulted after studies
made afield.
To Sprengel belongs the glory of first exalting flowers above the
level of botanical specimens. After studying the wild geranium he
became convinced, as he wrote in 1787, that "the wise Author of
Nature has not made even a single hair without a definite design.
A hundred years before, one, Nehemias Grew, had said that it was
necessary for pollen to reach the stigma of a flower in order
that it might set fertile seed, and Linnaeus bad to come to his
rescue with conclusive evidence to convince a doubting world that
he was right. Sprengel made the next step forward, but his
writings lay neglected over seventy years because he advanced the
then incredible and only partially true statement that a flower
is fertilized by insects which carry its pollen from its anthers
to its stigma. In spite of his discoveries that the hairs within
the wild geranium protect its nectar from rain for the insect
benefactor's benefit; that most flowers which secrete nectar have
what he termed "honey guides" - spots of bright color, heavy
veining, or some such pathfinder for the visitor on the petals;
that sometimes the male flowers, the staminate ones, are
separated from the seed-bearing or pistillate ones on distinct
plants, he left it to Darwin to show that cross-fertilization by
insects, the transfer of pollen from one blossom to another - not
from anthers to stigma of the same flower - is the great end to
which so much marvelous floral mechanism is adapted. The wind is
a wasteful, uncertain pollen distributor. Insects transfer it
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