178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



other, while engaged in their usual business of gathering honey all the 

 day from every opening flower. But Rafflesia, on the contrary, has 

 positively acquired a fallacious external resemblance to raw meat, and 

 a decidedly high flavor, on purpose to take in the too trustful Suma- 

 tran flies. When a fly sights and scents one, he (or rather she) pro- 

 ceeds at once to settle in the cup, and there lay a number of eggs in 

 what it naturally regards as a very fine decaying carcass. Then, hav- 

 ing dusted itself over in the process with plenty of pollen from this 

 first flower, it flies away confidingly to the next promising bud, in 

 search both of food for itself and of a fitting nursery for its future 

 little ones. In doing so, it of course fertilizes all the blossoms that it 

 visits, one after another, by dusting them successively with one an- 

 other's pollen. When the young grubs are hatched out, however, they 

 discover the base deception all too late, and perish miserably in their 

 fallacious bed, the helpless victims of misplaced parental confidence. 

 Even as Zeuxis deceived the very birds with his painted grapes, so 

 Rafilesia deceives the flies themselves by its ingenious mimicry of a 

 putrid beefsteak. In the fierce competition of tropical life, it has 

 found out by simple experience that dishonesty is the best jDolicy. 



The general principle which this strange flower illustrates in so 

 striking a fashion is just this : Most common flowers have laid them- 

 selves out to attract bees, and so a bee-flower forms our human ideal 

 of a central typical blossom : it looks, in short, we think, as a flower 

 ought to look. But there are some originally minded and eccentric 

 plants which have struck out a line for themselves, and taken to 

 attracting sundry casual flies, wasps, midges, beetles, snails, or even 

 birds, which take the place of bees as their regular fertilizers ; and it 

 is these Bohemians of the vegetable world that make up what we all 

 consider as the queerest and most singular of all flowers. They adapt 

 their appearance and structure to the particular tastes and habits of 

 their chosen guests. 



Now, the fact is, we are all a little tired of that prig and Aristides 

 among insects, the little busy bee. We have heard his virtues praised 

 by poets, moralists, and men of science, till we are all burning to os- 

 tracize him forthwith, for the sake of never more hearing him called 

 industrious and intelligent. He and his self-righteous cousin, the ant, 

 are in fact a pair of egregious Pharisaical humbugs, who have made a 

 virtue of their own excessive acquisitiveness, and have induced Solo- 

 mon, Yirgil, Dr. Watts, and other misguided human beings to acqui- 

 esce far too readily in their preposterous claims. For my own part, 

 I never was more pleased in my life than when Sir John Lubbock con- 

 clusively proved by experiment that they were both extremely stupid 

 and uninventive insects, with scarcely a faint glimmering of brotherly 

 love or any other good ethical quality, I propose, therefore, in this 

 present paper, to leave the too-much-belauded bee, with the flowers 

 that cater for his tastes, entirely out of consideration, and look only 



