Ai-RiL, 1929 



EVOLUTION 



Page Eleven 



The Amateur Scientist 



A Monthly Feature conducted by Allan Strong Broms 

 Spring Flowers 



"The flowers that bloom in the spring, 



tra la, 

 Breathe promise of merry sunshine." 



BUT not for themselves. For soon 

 the trees above vifill be putting out 

 dense thickets of leaves to cast deep 

 shadows below. Light means life in 



SKudK C£ibb&9e. 



Symplocappus fatidus 



the plant world and shadow death. 

 So many of the smaller plants have 

 solved the problem by beating their 

 tree neighbors to it in the spring, 

 shoving their leaves up quickly before 

 the tree shadows thicken. 



They live briefly, but completely. By 

 braving the spring chill, they manage 

 to show their flowers, get them fer- 

 tilized and so accomplish the impor- 

 tant work of getting the next genera- 

 tion well started on its way, all before 

 the slower trees have put out their 

 foliage for the summer. This duty to 

 the future done, they shrivel away into 

 inconspicuousness. They are in such 

 a rush about it all that one hardly 

 realizes spring has come before they 

 appear and quickly pass away. 



Thus the spring flowers, besides 

 promising summer days and provid- 

 ing poets with sweet subjects, exem- 

 plify such celebrated virtues as seizing 

 time by the forelock, doing today 

 what would be too late on the mor- 

 row and practicing the rule of early to 

 bed and early to rise. This virtuous 

 tribe is quite numerous, but just look 

 for these: Skunk cabbage, False Helle- 

 bore, Adder's tongue, Trillium, Rue 

 anemone, Bloodroot and Jack-in-the- 

 pulpit, all well matured before the or- 

 dinary plants have started in. 



First of all, usually, is the Skunk 

 cabbage. Being such an early plant, it 

 wraps itself cozily to keep warm. Be- 

 sides, it makes friends with certain 

 little flies that venture forth while the 

 air is still chilly by providing them 

 with warm shelter within its wrapper 

 of leaves. In return, these flies bear 

 the plant's pollen from flower to 

 flower and so effect the fertilization 



nostrils, mouth — these are too delicate, 

 too intricate for words of one syllable. 

 Yet to read and understand this vol- 

 ume requires no more concentrated at- 

 tention than the remembrance of the 

 highest diamond in the ninth trick, or 

 to what Steel Preferred fell in the 

 Autumn of 1914. 



I advise no Fundamentalist or Anti- 

 Evolutionist to read it, for if he have 

 no sense of humor he will not under- 

 stand it, and if he have, his belief will 

 be like Dunsany's King who "was as 

 though he never had been." If with 

 Bergson we believe that the origin of 

 laughter was cruelty, then an S. P. C. 

 to something should be formed to pre- 

 vent the spectacle of a Fundamental- 

 ist's face functioning with the third 

 eyelid of a bird, the earpoint of a deer, 

 the honorable scars of most ancient 

 gills, and with his lip-lifting muscles in 

 full action as he sneers at truth. A 

 moment's thought of these few char- 

 acters presents a new viewpoint on 

 what we are wont to call the "lower" 



animals, for if our third eyelid were 

 more than a degenerate flap we, like 

 an eagle, could look straight at the 

 sun; if our ears could straighten and 

 turn as once, the lives of pedestrians 

 would be safer; if the ghosts of gills 

 were still functional, drowning would 

 be impossible, and if the fang-revealing 

 sneer showed less degenerate canines, 

 we might have a more physically 

 wholesome fear of cavilers against the 

 doctrine of Evolution. 



The impregnable array of facts 

 gleaned through the centuries of man's 

 intellectual supremacy proves beyond 

 all question the gradual rise toward 

 human perfection of the various com- 

 ponents of the face, and this confirms 

 our precious organs of sense as most 

 noble gateways of the human mind and 

 soul. Kindness, gentleness, tactfulness, 

 patience, can flow out through only 

 these channels. It is a worthy thing 

 to have written a book about them: 

 it is a fortunate chance to be able 

 to read it. 



which starts the seeds growing. You 

 wonder where the flower is, for there 

 are no colored petals. The working 

 parts are there all right, colors being 

 but a lure, replaced in this case by a 

 strong odor, attractive to the flies, but 

 disagreeable to us, whence the very 

 descriptive name "skunk cabbage." 



Jack-in-the-pulpit lures the pollen- 

 bearing insects with color and sweet 

 nectar in its flower. But it wants only 

 those that fly, for crawling insects 

 make slow progress between plants 

 and knock about so much on the way 

 that they lose and waste the precious 

 pollen. So Jack, despite his pious pre- 

 tensions, traps and kills the creeping 

 wastrels, while letting the flying kinds 

 come and go. The inner walls of his 

 pulpit are slippery and impossible to 

 climb. Only the flying insects make 

 their way out and this is quite as the 

 plant would have it. 



To effect the quick spring growth, 

 the Bloodroot and many another 

 spring flower lays in a food reserve 

 in rootstock, bulb or tuber. 



THE BLOODROOT AND ITS FOODSTORE 



A kindred group of flowers is exem- 

 plified by the Crocus of our spring 

 fields. Its problem is not that of 

 avoiding summer shadows, but of es- 

 caping the choking summer growth 

 of grass and weeds. So it too comes 

 out early, lives its brief life and 

 quickly goes back to rest thi-ough the 

 seasons of summer crowding and win- 

 ter freezing. Out in the open, ex- 

 posed to cold winds and late frosts, it 

 has developed a warm coat of fuzzy 

 hair, enabling it to brave the spring 

 chills a bit earlier than its plant rivals. 



So even the flowers are engaged in 

 a bitter struggle for existence in 

 which chance variations of structure 

 or habit which favor survival are 

 preserved by natural selection, thus 

 causing evolution towards forms and 

 ways better fitted to meet the prob- 

 lems of their environment. 



