AMERICAN HONEY PLANTS 169 



creation. Sprengel was convinced that an all-wise Creator would not 

 have made a single hair in vain, and he set about discovering what these 

 hairs .were for, much as a sensible person, seeing the governor on an en- 

 gine today would try to find out what it is for. Below the break between 

 ■the petals, he found a nectar gland, producing its sugary fluid; and he saw 

 the hairs would prevent the nectar from being diluted or washed away by 

 rain or dew. This brought him back to the original question — what nec- 

 taries and nectar are for. He got his answer to this by watching the 

 plant and seeing that bees visited the flowers and removed the nectar as 

 what might be called the raw materials of the honey industry. 



In Sprengel's day the general impression was not only that things 

 have been created just as we find .them, but created for our own ultimate 

 good. So Sprengel found an answer in discovering that the hair fringe of 

 the geranium petals protects the nectar of the flowers and so preserves 

 it for bees to use in manufacturing honey for our breakfast table. 



When you stop to think about it, Sprengel could hardly have had the 

 curiosity to study out his geranium question to an answer without being 

 spurred to look at other flowers to see if they might not have something 

 interesting of the same sort to offer. He yielded to the impulse to look at 

 other flowers, and he found his geranium to be a very drab specimen com- 

 pared with some of the irregular and painted flowers that he studied out in 

 the same way. He must have felt no common pride when, in 1793, he pub- 

 lished the results of his studies, with simple but effective illustrations, 

 under a title that meant revealing to mankind the newly discovered secret 

 of nature in the structure and fertilization of flowers. 



But Sprengel seems not to have been the sort of man to whom such 

 an answer really was an answer, and he looked further. It does not seem 

 to have taken him long to see that while gathering their own store of 

 honey, and obviously without consciousness that they were doing anything 

 else, the bees became dusted with pollen from geranium stamens and 

 rubbed it off on geranium stigmas while going their rounds of the flowers. 

 This conclusion evidently answered two questions — what the hairs are for, 

 and what nectar is for. 



It is not necessary to walk down Michigan Boulevard on a windy day 

 to realize that we belong to an imitative race. The corner grocery and 

 the drug store show it as well as the windows of milliners and dress- 

 makers, shoe shops and news stands, or as the sights that issue from a 

 barber shop in a college town. 



Fashions run in fads and interests quite as much as in dress. Linnaeus 

 was a great botanist ; perhaps none has been greater. He not only re- 

 duced a chaotic science to order, but interested men in its study to a re- 

 markable extent. It is rather unfairly charged against him that because 

 his service was somewhat one-sided, those whose interest he awakened 

 were extremely one-sided, in that they did not see or care for much in 

 botany beyond finding, describing and classifying new plants. This was 

 well enough worth doing; it is not finished yet, and will not be finished- 

 for many years to come; but it had become so fascinating and workable 



