90 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



buttercup is one of its best-known members. It 

 is yellow in colour, a point which is common to 

 most early and simple flowers, because the sta- 

 mens are generally yellow, and when they devel- 

 oped into petals they naturally retained at first 

 their original colouring. Only later and for vari- 

 ous special reasons did certain higher flowers 

 come by degrees to be white, pink, red, blue, 

 purple, or variegated. There is some reason to 

 believe, indeed, that the various other colours 

 were developed one after the other in the order 

 here named, and to the present day all the sim- 

 plest families of flowers remain chiefly yellow, as 

 do the simpler and earlier members of more ad- 

 vanced families. 



The common bulbous buttercup is thus pre- 

 vailingly yellow, because it is an early and simple 

 type of flower. It consists of four distinct and 

 successive layers, or whorls of organs. Outside 

 all comes a calyx of five sepals, which cover the 

 flower in the bud, but are hardly noticeable in the 

 open blossom. They also serve to keep off ants 

 and other creeping insects, for which purpose they 

 are turned back on the stem, and are covered 

 with small hairs. " But I thought the plant 

 wanted to attract insects," you will say. Yes, the 

 right kind of insects, the flying types, which go 

 from one flower to another of the same sort, and 

 so promote due fertilisation. Flying insects, at- 

 tracted by colour and shape of petals, keep to one 

 brand of honey at a time ; they never mix their 

 liquors. But ants are drawn on by the smell of 

 honey only ; they crawl up one stem after an- 

 other indiscriminately, and steal the nectar which 

 the plant intends for its regular winged visitors. 

 Even if they do occasionally fertilise a flower, it 



