336 HOW PLANTS LIVE AND WORK. 



like those of a wasp. As we examine bees which obtain their 

 honey from deeper and deeper parts of flowers, we find that the 

 lower lip becomes longer and longer, until, in butterflies and 

 moths, the proboscis reaches an astonishing length. There are 

 similar gradations in the development of hairs on the hind legs. 

 In many bees the legs are simply hairy, and the pollen is carried 

 off entangled in the hairs ; but the hive-bees work the pollen into a 

 paste with honey, and carry it off on one side of the leg. Further 

 than this, the humble bee has managed to develop a structure on 

 its hind leg which acts as a small basket, in which the little piece of 

 pollen — worked up into a dough with honey — is carried. 



IV. — The Life of the Masses. 



A student of social conditions would acquire an extremely 

 limited and one-sided view of life if he formed his conclusions 

 solely from observations of a church parade in the height of the 

 London season. If his mental perspective were not to be hope- 

 lessly distorted, it would be necessary for him to take into con- 

 sideration the conditions of life among the great mass of the 

 population, and it would be from such considerations that his 

 soundest views would be formed. Even then his ideas would be 

 merely superficial, and he could only hope to arrive at the tiue 

 relations of the phenomena of modern life by taking into account 

 the causes to which the phenomena are due — causes which could 

 not be rightly understood and realised except by the study of the 

 history of the race. 



So it is with the races of plants. Flowering plants are no 

 doubt the most picturesque, and the gay costumes they assume in 

 the season win the admiration of every lover of beauty. But 

 there is also the rank and file of the plant social system to be 

 considered ; the humble beings of whose beauty no poet ever 

 raves, whose very name of " Cryptogams " indicates that their 

 marriage customs are invisible to the unaided eye. Every ditch 

 contains minute plants of exquisite beauty ; the woods and hedge- 

 rows are covered with decayed aristocrats, who trace their descent 

 from mighty forest kings. Even the flowering plant has to contend 

 against the insidious onslaught of blackmailing parasites. It is 

 mainly from the study of these lower forms that the recent enor- 



