XIII 



THE FLOWERS OF BRAZIL 



x\t the close of my last chapter, I said that the eye is born of the 

 light, and turns to the light. Light attracts the eye; involuntarily 

 the gaze fastens on places where lights gleam, where colours glow. 

 For this reason the characteristic markings which are intended to 

 catch the eye are for the most part brightly coloured. They take 

 the eye captive; it looks at them more and more closely; the back- 

 ground dissolves into a new atmosphere. 



Not only birds, beetles, and butterflies bedeck the landscape with 

 coloured high-lights, but also the flowers. And it occurs to us to 

 wonder whether their colours too were designed to catch the eye. 

 For the eye is held by them; and everyone who comes from the 

 tropics is asked the question, whether the magnificent flowers do not 

 constitute the chiefest charm of the tropics. 



But the plants have no eyes, and the colours of their flowers 

 cannot give signals by which one plant may recognize another of 

 its kind. What could it profit them indeed if one plant recognized 

 another, seeing that all are fastened to the spot on which they stand? 

 If we are to believe that the colours of the flowers mean nothing 

 unless there are eyes to see them, these eyes can only be the eyes 

 of animals, birds, insects. But if this is so we have yet another 

 proof of the harmonious homogeneity of all the parts of Nature, of 

 the truth of the idea which has been repeatedly expressed in these 

 pages, that no living creature lives to itself, but for the whole, to 

 whose perfection it contributes. 



And, in fact, the flora and the fauna of a country belong to one 

 another, and the counterpart of the flower is the insect. We might 

 say that flowers and insects were, in a sense, developed from a single 

 idea when once their time had come, as a fresh enrichment of the 

 painting of Nature, and that here again we perceive her miraculous 

 property of changing, not only from hour to hour, but also from 

 epoch to epoch, like the images of a kaleidoscope, without ever 

 destroying the harmony of the whole. 



Not until the end of the geological Middle Ages, in the so-called 



Cretaceous period, did the flowering plants appear, and only from 



this period did the insects begin the upward ascent which has led 



to their present wealth of species. Nature, before that period, must 



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