1887-88.] Colouring Matters of Leaves and Flowers. 297 



selecting of the gardener, is more common than Mr Wallace 

 supposes. 



The following extract from Mr Grant Allen's Colour 

 Sense illustrates the popular and, to the thoughtless, really 

 misleading manner of treating the subject : — " Insects pro- 

 duce flowers ; flowers produce insects. The colour-sense 

 produces a taste for colour ; the taste for colour produces 

 brilliant butterflies and brilliant beetles. Birds and mammals 

 produce fruits ; fruits produce a taste for colom' in birds 

 and mammals. The taste for colour produces the external 

 hues of humming birds, parrots, and monkeys ; man's frugi- 

 vorous ancestry produces in him a similar taste, and that 

 taste produces in him the final result of human chromatic 

 arts." 



From this passage there is little information other than 

 that there exists a remarkable interaction between plants and 

 animals. "With a similar attitude and manner, Dr J. E. Taylor 

 speaks of " various colours held in reserve, to be brought out 

 at a moment's notice." He instances the three-coloured 

 varieties of Anemone 'patcns, regarding the separation of the 

 colours as a clear case in which nature has provided the plant 

 with " three kinds of bait," just as a novice in the art of 

 angling will be advised to provide himself with differently 

 coloured flies. 



Mr Wallace says, regarding sexual selection (and the 

 passage is as applicable to the selection of flowers as of mates), 

 " there is not one particle of evidence to show that minute 

 differences in the colour of the same species are observed by 

 insects, still less that such differences are so important to 

 them as to lead to the rejection of a healthy and well- 

 organised mate " (or individual). 



Thus selection of flowers is dependent, not on minute 

 variation in colour, but on such changes as we may expect 

 would be appreciable in the size of the flower ; in the group- 

 ing of several flowers together by shortening of the axis ; and 

 on sudden or conspicuous changes in colour, such as might 

 be brought about by several of the factors of the plant's en- 

 vironment to which we have alluded. So in that part of the 

 plant where characteristically there is evidenced a shortening 

 of the axis, where reproduction prevails in contradistinction 

 to veo'etation, where also natural selection acts towards the 



