76 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



Insects and Poi.i.e;n. — In general, insect pc^llinated 

 flowers are showy and wind pollinated flowers inconspicuous, 

 but the insects often fail to play the game according to the 

 rules and visit many flowers that seem properly designed to 

 be pollinated by the wind. As a matter of fact the abund- 

 ant pollen of various wind pollinated flowers must often at- 

 tract insects that normally visit more showy specimens. Nor 

 should it be forgotten that pollen as well as nectar is food 

 for insects. A a recent meeting of the Torrey Botanical 

 Club, O. P. Medsger mentioned the fact that bees often visit 

 the blossoms of timothy grass for the pollen. He also re- 

 ported tliat mining bees, living on the edge of the New Jer- 

 sey marshes, collect much pollen which they fashion into 

 balls half an inch in diameter. This is used as food by the 

 developing larvae. The speaker was of the opinion that our 

 native plants are mostly pollinated by native insects and that 

 honey-bees, themselves introduced from Europe, are the chief 

 agents in pollinating the flowers of introduced plants. 



Orchid Skdds. — Darwin held that in general, plants which 

 produce a large number of small seeds are lower in organiza- 

 tion than those which produce a smaller number of better- 

 equipped seeds. Orchids, however, are regarded as the highest 

 type of Monocotyledons and yet their seeds are among the 

 smallest produced by flowering plants and are so incomplete as 

 to lack an embryo. Darwin estimated that a single seed-pod 

 of a species of Cephalanthera contained more than six thous- 

 and seeds and that a single flower spike of Orchis mdsaila 

 contained 186,000. This, however, is far short of what 

 orchids can do at their best for Fritz Muller estimated that a 

 single capsule of a Maxillaria yielded 1,756,440 seeds. One 

 reason for this great profusion of seeds seems to be that 

 orchids depend upon a fungus partner for satisfactory growth 



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