CHAPTER V 

 FLOWERS 



Man's ideas of the use of flowers— Sprengel's great discovery — Insects, 

 not man, consulted — Pollen carried to set seed — Flowers and insects 

 of the Whinstone Age— Coal Age flowers — Monkey-puzzle times — 

 Chalk flowers — Wind-blown poUen — Extravagant expenditure of 

 pollen in them— Flower of the pine — Exploding flowers — Brilliant 

 alpines — Intense life in flowers — Colour contrasts — Lost bees — Even- 

 ing flowers — Humming birds and sunbirds — Kangaroo — Floral clocks 

 — Ages of flowers — How to get flowers all the year round — Ingenious 

 contrivances — Yucca and fig— Horrible-smelling flowers— Artistic 

 tastes of birds, insects, and man. 



FOR many centuries flowers were considered as pleasing 

 and attractive decorations stuck about the world in 

 the same way as they are put in a drawing-room in 

 order to give people pleasure. Very soon they were found 

 to be extremely useful in poetry, sometimes to point a 

 moral or disguise a sermon, like the primrose in Peter Bell, 

 but more generally to produce a good impression on the 

 BELOVED OBJECT. Bums puts the usual view of flowers very 

 nicely in the following : " But I will down yon river rove 

 amang the woods sae green, and a' to pu"* a posie to my ain 

 dear May."*' Possibly this is the meaning also in the ex- 

 quisite lines of Shakespeare about the pansy : — 



" Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell : 

 It fell upon a little western flower, — 

 Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, — 

 And maidens call it, love-in-idleness. '^ 

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