Like many another immigrant to our hospitable shores, this vigorous invader shows a tendency to outstrip native blossoms in life's race. Having won in the struggle for survival in the old country, where the contest has been most fiercely waged for centuries, it finds life here easy, enjoyable. What are its methods for insuring an abundance of fertile seed? We see that the tube of the flower is so nearly closed by the stamens and five-styled pistil as to be adapted only to the long, slender tongues of moths and butterflies, for which benefactors it became narrow and deep to reserve the nectar. "A certain night-flying moth (one of the Dianthaecia) fertilizes flowers of this genus exclusively, and its larvae feed on their unripe seeds as a staple. Bees and some long-tongued flies seen about the corn cockle doubtless get pollen only; but there are few flowers so deep that the longest-tongued bees cannot sip them. Butterflies, attracted by the bright color of the flower - and to them color is the most catchy of advertisements - are guided by a few dark lines on the petals to the nectary. Soon after the blossom opens, five of the stamens emerge from the tube and shed their pollen on the early visitor. Later, the five other stamens empty the contents of their anthers on more tardy comers. Finally, when all danger of self-fertilization is past, the styles stretch upward, and the butterfly, whose head is dusted with pollen brought from earlier flowers, necessarily leaves some on their sticky surfaces as he takes the leavings in the nectary. So much cross-fertilized seed as the plant now produces and scatters through the grain fields may well fill the farmer's prosaic mind with despair. To him there is no glory in the scarlet of the poppy comparable with the glitter of a silver dollar; no charm in the heavenly blue of the corn-flower, that likewise preys upon the fertility of his soil; the vivid flecks of color with which the cockle lights up his fields mean only loss of productiveness in the earth that would yield him greater profit without them. Moreover, seeds of this so-called weed not only darken his wheat when they are threshed out together, but are positively injurious if swallowed in any quantity. Emerson said every plant is called a weed until its usefulness is discovered. Linnaeus called this flower Agrostemma = the crown-of-the-field. Agriculturalists never realize that beauty is in itself a sufficient plea for respected existence. Not a few of the cockle's relatives adorn men's gardens. WILD PINK or CATCHFLY (Silene Caroliniana; S. Pennsylvanica of Gray) Pink family