THE COURSE OF BIOLOGIC EVOLUTION. 47 



To size, showiness, and beauty of coloration, was often added 

 fragrance which was especially successful with moths and other 

 nocturnal insects. Many special inducements were held out. 

 Sweet and nutritious nectars were secreted from the petals to 

 lure on the unsuspecting creatures, and deep, and peculiar 

 grooves, sacs, and spurs were developed to hold this nectar in 

 large quantities. These nectaries were so adjusted that no bee 

 could enter without passing directly over the stigma and brush- 

 ing upon it the precious dust of other flowers. Wonderful 

 contrivances thus came into existence to secure this supreme 

 end of plant being, and the present world of flowers was ulti- 

 mately evolved. 



The profound modification accomplished by this agency was 

 not confined to size, color, fragrance, and the secretion of nec- 

 tar. The forms of flowers underwent in man}- cases a complete 

 change, and an infinite number of wonderful irregularities ap- 

 peared, varying from the slightest differences in the petals to 

 the amazing abnormalities of the orchids, all calculated to 

 adapt plants to the useful ministrations of insects, sometimes, 

 as in the yucca, to those of a single species of insect without 

 which reproduction is impossible. 



And thus it has come about that the form of every flower 

 has its special meaning which can be interpreted by those who 

 have penetrated this great secret. We hear of the language of 

 flowers — that the rose signifies beauty, the daisy innocence, the 

 violet modesty, the myrtle love — but science has discovered a 

 new and real language which the flower not only speaks but 

 writes in clear characters, and which the botanist deciphers 

 and reads by much the same methods that the assyriologist em- 

 ploys when he deciphers and reads the arrow-head inscrip- 

 tions upon the tablets of Nineveh. 



It is thus that flowers are accounted for by modern science 



