582 Insects and Flowers 



flowers would not be visited by insects unless they had some inducements 

 more substantial to offer. These inducements are the pollen and, to the 

 great majority of flower-visiting insects, the nectar. 



It is of distinct interest to note that no plants with colored flower-parts 

 or special floral envelopes e.xisted (in geological time) before the time of 

 winged insects. The oldest fossil Angio.sperms, monocotyledons as well 

 as dicotyledons, are from the lower Cretaceous rock strata; in Tertiary times 

 there was a great increase in the number and variety ot the dicotyledons, 

 and most of the present families were probably in existence in those times. 

 Winged insects are known from Devonian rocks, and much more numer- 

 ously from Carboniferous strata; but all these early Paleozoic insects belong 

 to the lower more generalized kinds, which to-day take little part in cross- 

 pollination. Not until Jurassic times did the higher orders appear, the 

 Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, and Diptera, which include the great majority 

 of the cross-pollinating insect agents. Thus the insects which we know to- 

 day as the pollen- and nectar-feeders, hence flower-visitors, began to be abun- 

 dant coincidcntly with or a little in advance of the flowering plants. Recip- 

 rocally helpful and mutually adapting themselves to the growing interrela- 

 tion, the flies, bees, moths, and butterflies on the animal side and the 

 dicotyledonous plants with varied flower-shapes, color, and pattern on the 

 vegetable side have developed so successfully that in present times both 

 flower-vi-siting insects and insect-attracting flowers have come to be the 

 most specialized and notable members of each of their respective groups of 

 organisms. 



