HAVE PLANTS A PEDIGREE f 



137 



But there are floral odors as well as colors which are offensive. We 

 do not understand the laws of odor so well as those of sound and color. 

 We educate the eye and the ear, but in the nose we are still cave-men. 

 If we can trust a savant who has spent years in the cultivation of his 

 olfactories, odors are under the same law as sounds and colors. Cer- 

 tain odors blend into a sort of music of smells as certain notes into a 

 music of sounds. Other odors refuse to blend, but jar on the nose like 

 discordant sounds on the ear. Septimius Piesse must live in a world 

 of harsh notes and grating discords. Even to us the account seems 

 nearly balanced between the odorous and the mal-odorous. The wild- 

 rose is sweet, but the datura is sickening. The ailantus may be scored 

 against the pink, and against the jasmine, the queen of flowers, whose 

 fragrance is the only secret the floral world withholds from our chemis- 

 tries — against the jasmine may be scored the carrion-flower. The odor 

 of the flower is what its name implies. Surely it was not given for 

 man's pleasure. Then for what ? Perhaps from this very flower we 

 may learn the rationale of odors. 



The flower of the carrion-plant is of a pale yellow-green and is alto- 

 gether inconspicuous. If it had no attraction but its color, it would 

 never win the attention of an insect. Now, it is a fact of gi-eat sig- 

 nificance that this carrion-flower is fertilized by the blow-fly. But 

 what dc^s the blow-fly want of a flower? If this flower were sensitive 

 and rational and skilled in chemistries, we might imagine the corre- 

 lation between itself and the fly to be the result of a mental process 

 something like this : " At any cost I must secure fertilization. The 

 wind cannot serve me, and bees and butterflies cannot find me. I will 

 invite the blow- fly — I will practise deception. I will smell like decay- 

 ing flesh ! " Of course, this is fanciful. [Suppose we imagine an in- 

 telligence outside of the plant, and the insect arranging by special crea- 

 tion such correlations between color, odor, nectary, and bees, moths, 

 flies, and butterflies. Does it bring us any nearer to a mental resting- 

 place ? Rather, do not questions without end start up in the mind ? 

 Why such indirection ? Why such seeming design marred by seem- 

 ing chance as in the iris ? And if all these structures and colors and 

 odors are the result of special creation, what shall we say of deadly 

 nightshades ? of poison-ivies ? of the fungi which live on the human 

 body ? Was there a special provision for certain fungi to grow on the 

 forehead ? for others to thrive in the mouth ? for others still to infest 

 the stomach ? Was the body of man designed to be the habitat of 

 pain-giving parasites? We have found plants good and not good, 

 beautiful and not beautiful, odorous and mal-odorous. If the world 

 were a theophany, would it not be good only, good everywhere and 

 equally ? To interpret the vegetal world as a " special creation " no 

 more satisfies the religious sentiment than the reason. 



Our common loosestrife [Lysimachia quadrifolia) is one of the 

 most variable of species. Its European representative (X. vulgaris) 



