THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 117 



Bees and Red Clover. — It scarcely seems possible that a 

 difference of less than an eighth of an inch in the length of a 

 bee's tongue could increase or diminish the hay and honey crop 

 by hundreds of tons, but this is exactly what occurs annually. 

 There is an immense amount of honey stored in the long tubes 

 of the red clover and other plants, which the honey bee cannot 

 reach and so this crop goes ungathered. But the bees and bee 

 keepers are not the only losers. If the honey bees were able to 

 get honey from red clover blossoms they would of course, work 

 on them with the result that the blossoms would be more ex- 

 tensively pollinated and therefore produce more seeds. Since 

 hay is sold by weight, every extra pound of seed is so much 

 gain to the farmer. The problem that now confronts the agri- 

 culturalist is how to adapt flower and insect to each other. This 

 can be accomplished either by breeding a race of bees with 

 longer tongues or a race of clover with shorter tubes. The 

 farmer anxious for an increase in the clover yield would pre- 

 fer the latter method, but the bee-keeper would prefer to 

 lengthen the tongues of his bees, since thereby they would be 

 able to glean from other flowers from which they are now ex- 

 cluded by their short tongues. 



The Function .of Pollen. — "The fertilisation of 

 flowers" and the significance of pollen, as the male fertilising 

 element, was quite unknown until a little over two hundred 

 years ago, when it was discovered by one Nehemiah Grew 

 (who was in 1677 secretary of the Royal Society of London) 

 in the old Physick Garden opposite Magdalen College at Ox- 

 ford. Seventeen years later it was placed on a sure footing 

 by the experiments of Jacob Camerarius, who proved that 

 "seed" does not become fertile unless fecundated by pollen. It 

 is a singular fact that the ancients had no conception of the 

 existence of male and female reproductive particles in plants. 

 They seem to have regarded "pollen" as meaningless dust. 

 Aristotle expressly declares that plants have no males and fe- 

 males, though he says he knew some facts which led him to 



