2o8 SAGACITY AND MORALITY OF PLANTS. 



— comparatively modern though that event is — many 

 of them have undergone similar vicissitudes to those 

 which are nowadays affecting the human inhabitants. 

 Insect-fertilised or entomophilotis flowers could not of 

 course appear until the flower-haunting class of insects 

 had been introduced, and most probably both were 

 more or less evolved together. Therefore I hold it as 

 reasonable that wind-fertilised or anemophiloiis flowers 

 appeared first in order of time. There is every geolo- 

 gical reason to think so, for we have proofs of the most 

 decided of wind-crossed plants, the ConifercE, as far 

 back as the Devonian Period, and therefore many 

 geological ages before the higher coloured flowering 

 plants appeared, even allowing they were really in 

 bloom during the Cretaceous epoch, as is not im- 

 probable. 



But within that vast sweep of time what biological 

 changes may have occurred. Some flowers have 

 been slowly adapted to the visits of insects, and 

 have developed attractive organs accordingly. Ages 

 have passed away ; other flowers of a higher organi- 

 sation have cornpeted for the mastery ; other insects 

 have been evolved. Some of the older flowering- 

 plants have had to give way slowly, inch by inch, as it 

 were, and retire from their exalted entomopJiilous habit 

 to the more ancient anernophiloiis mode of life from 

 which they originally sprang ! Theirs has been a 

 brave but a losing fight. They have now retired from 

 the higher ranks — they are floral bankrupts. Traces 



