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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



insects, birds, fruits, and flowers, are tinted with 

 the brighter dyes of scarlet, crimson, orange, and 

 yellow. We shall see, on closer inspection, that 

 every one of these organic bodies has been special- 

 ly developed to meet the wants of animal eyes. 

 We shall find that the flower has been given its 

 brilliant corolla in order to attract the bee and 

 the butterfly ; that the fruit has acquired its 

 glowing coat in order to lure on the bird and 

 the mammal ; and that the feathers, scales, and 

 gaudy fur, of these animate creatures themselves 

 have a special relation to the nature of their 

 food, their habits, and their surroundings. In 

 other words, the beautiful colors of the external 

 world, and the delight which conscious minds 

 feel in their beauty, have both a common origin 

 in the great principles of evolution and natural 

 selection. Let us see what light can be shed 

 upon this intricate question of their interdepen- 

 dence by the magnificent generalizations which 

 science and humanity owe to Herbert Spencer 

 and Charles Darwin. 



If we wish to get at the very origin of flowers, 

 we must go a long way back in time to the ear- 

 liest geological age ; and we must look at the 

 condition of those vast primeval forests in which 

 terrestrial animal life made with trembling feet 

 its first forward steps. We must imagine our- 

 selves placed as spectators in the midst of a flora 

 totally unlike any now existing on our earth — a 

 flora which we can only picture to ourselves by 

 its incomplete resemblance to a few surviving but 

 antiquated forms. In the great tropical swamps, 

 whose refuse supplies the coal for our grates, 

 there grew a thick herbage of ferns and club- 

 mosses and strange green plants, but probably 

 not a single distinguishable flower. It is true 

 that a fair sprinkling among the vegetable pro- 

 ductions of those luxuriant wilds belong to the 

 botanical sub-kingdom of Phanerogams or flower- 

 ing plants ; but these few exceptions are almost 

 all trees or shrubs of the pine and palm kinds, 

 bearing the green cones or catkins which science 

 recognizes as inflorescences, but not the conspic- 

 uous bunches of colored leaves which ordinary 

 people know as flowers. In the forests which 

 then bordered the great deltas of forgotten Ama- 

 zons and Niles, it seems probable that no gleam 

 of scarlet, blue, or purple, ever broke the inter- 

 minable sea of waving green. Uncanny trees, 

 with sculptured or tesselated bark, raised their 

 verdant heads high above the damp soil into 

 which they thrust their armor-plated roots ; huge 

 horse-tails swayed their jointed stems before the 

 fiercer tempests raised by a younger and lustier 



sun; tree-ferns, screw-pines, and araucarias, di- 

 versified the landscape with their quaint and 

 symmetrical shapes ; J while beneath, the rich, de- 

 caying mould was carpeted with mosses, lichens, 

 and a thousand creeping plants, all of them bear- 

 ing the archaic stamp peculiar to these earliest 

 developments of vegetable life : but nowhere 

 could the eye of an imaginary visitor have lighted 

 on a bright flower, a crimson fruit, or a solitary 

 gaudily-painted butterfly. Green, and green, and 

 green again, on every side ; the gaze would have 

 rested, wherever it fell, upon one unbroken field 

 of glittering verdure. 



To put it simply, all the earliest plants be- 

 longed to the flowerless division of the vegetable 

 kingdom ; and, though a few flowering species 

 made their appearance on earth even before the 

 epoch at which our coal beds were formed, yet 

 these were of the sort whose pollen is borne by 

 the wind, and whose blossoms are accordingly 

 unprovided with gay colors, or sweet scents, or 

 honeyed secretions, as a bait for the insect visit- 

 or to rifle and fertilize their bloom. The greater 

 part of the larger coal flora consisted of acro- 

 gens, that is to say, of plants like the ferns, club- 

 mosses, and horse-tails, which have spores instead 

 of seeds, and so, of course, bear neither fruit nor 

 flower. The smaller creeping plants belonged to 

 the same class, or to the still more humble thal- 

 logens, represented in our world by lichens and 

 sea-weeds. Only a few conifers foreshadowed the 

 modern tribes of flowering plants ; and even these 

 were of the most abnormal and antiquated type 

 to be found in the whole sub-kingdom. 



How, then, did those crimson, orange, or 

 purple leaves which make up the popular idea of 

 a flower first originate ? And how did the seed, 

 which it is their object to produce, become coated 

 with that soft, sweet, pulpy, and bright-colored 

 envelope which we call in every-day language a 

 fruit ? Clearly, the first of these questions must 

 be answered before we attack the second, both 

 because the flower precedes the fruit in point of 

 time, and because the tastes formed by the flower 

 have become the raison d'etre of the fruit. I pro- 

 pose, therefore, in the present paper, to attempt 

 some slight solution of the earlier problems ; and 

 I hope, in a future number of the Cornhill Maga- 

 zine, to set before my readers some remarks upon 

 the later one. 



The origin of flowers is not a difficult subject 

 upon which to hazard a plausible conjecture. 



1 These names must only be accepted in a repre- 

 sentative sense, as giving a modern reader the nearest 

 familiar congener of the extiuet forms. 



