Social Jflowers. 97 



and umbels, a good many cycles before man was 

 taken into the account. They had reasons far more 

 cogent and pressing than merely to get ready to 

 please the eye of a being of the future, whose advent 

 was still a matter of several eons ahead. 



"It was a practical question of getting a living, 

 a real matter of life and death with these flowers, 

 whether they should combine and live closer to- 

 gether, or scatter themselves in isolation along the 

 stems on which they dwelt. Because every one of 

 them depended, for the perpetuation of its kind, 

 upon the visits of insects on their travels, who, 

 carrying the pollen across from flower to flower, 

 cross-fertilised the blossoms and so secured the con- 

 tinuance of the plant. That result was most cer- 

 tainly attained in the case of those stalks on which 

 the blossoms were crowded most thickly. For there 

 the hurrying bees and wasps and moths and smaller 

 honey hunters, the agents of the earliest sugar trusts, 

 could most easily take up the pollen from one blos- 

 som and dust it over the next. But more than this, 

 these busy creatures were more certain to alight and 

 try their luck for sweets on some spot where a 

 cluster of flowers made the red or the white or the 

 yellow more conspicuous than it could be in a single 

 blossom. So the clustering flowers were more likely 

 to be cross-fertilised than the solitary ones ; and 

 their offspring were more likely to survive than the 

 children of the self-fertilised blossoms. Thus the 

 tendency to gather in groups helped perpetuate 



