THE COLOURS OF FLOWERS: 175 
THE COLOURS OF FLOWERS. 
BY F. T. MOTT, F.R.G.S. 
There is a school of modern philosophers who assert that flowers 
are produced by insects, that their sole purpose is to attract insects, that 
their forms and colours have no other function whatever, and that 
without insects they could never have come into existence. Now, 
although I believe in the doctrines of evolution and selection, I do not 
believe in this. I think those doctrines are made to cover too wide a 
field; that their extreme advocates regard them too one-sidedly, and do 
not sufficiently take account of other natural laws and forces which are 
of equal importance. We may admit that insects have helped and 
hastened the development of coloured flowers, as a man who widens the 
channel of a stream helps and hastens the discharge of water, but that 
flowers could never have existed without insects seems to me an untenable 
theory. This one fact alone is I think fatal to it, viz., that before insect 
selection could possibly come into play colour must have been already 
developed to some extent; and surely the organic forces which were 
competent to originate colour are competent to perpetuate and to 
increase it, only give them time. It seems evident that there is in 
vegetable life some profounder cause for the development of coloured 
blossom than the mere external influence of insects. What is that 
cause? Consider what colour means. Everyone is now supposed to know 
that white light is compounded of a variety of coloured lights, which may be 
classified into three primary types, thered, the green, and the violet—the 
red being those in which the ether-waves are longest, the violet those in 
which they are shortest, and the green those in which they are of inter- 
mediate length. The colour of any object depends upon its power to 
stop, or neutralise, or absorb some of these waves, and to reflect the 
balance. A blue object is one which absorbs the long red waves and 
reflects the green and violet, the combination of these without the red 
giving the sensation of blue to our eyes. A yellow object absorbs the 
short violet waves, and reflects the red and green, whose combination 
produces yellow. A red object absorbs both the green and the violet, and 
reflects the red only, and so on. If all the waves are reflected without 
absorption or alteration, the object has a shining appearance, like glass 
or water, or some glazed leaves. But when they are not only all 
reflected, but very much scattered by a number of surfaces which are not 
parallel, then the object appears white. If all the waves are absorbed 
and none reflected the object is black. If some waves of all the different 
lengths are reflected, while some of them are absorbed, the colour will be 
grey. It would be white, only that there is too little light reflected 
altogether to produce the effect of white. Grey is simply a dark and 
feeble white. In the same way brown is a dark feeble yellow, olive a 
dark feeble green, and lead colour a dark feeble blue. Now look at the 
