THE MEADOW BEAUTY. 97 



kind of inflated air sac, with thin walls, which when pressed upon 

 or struck, as when an insect lights upon it or touches it with his 

 rapidly moving wings, it acts like a bellows and blows little 

 puffs or jets of pollen dust out of the small pore at the end. 

 Thus the stigma of the flower or the insect himself gets abun- 

 dantly besprinkled with the fertilizing powder, which we can easily 

 see he might convey to other Rhexia blooms. 



We can scarcely look upon so beautiful a wild-flower as this 

 without asking ourselves how came these colors and these strange 

 forms of beauty? Are they for themselves alone? Or are they 

 to please the aesthetic taste of the beholder, for 



" Since eyes were made for seeing 

 Beauty is its own excuse for being." 



Still, it must be remembered if we think we will make that 

 answer, that, 



" Full many a flower is born to blush unseen 

 And waste its sweetness on the desert air." 



And, ages and ages after the flowers began to bloom, there was 

 upon the earth no beauty-drinking eye to quaff ethereal sweetness 

 from their tinted petals. Did they serve no good end in all those 

 vast periods ? 



The naturalist, who thinks he must find a reason for everything 

 he sees in nature, has undertaken to show how plants came to 

 have flowers at all ; that is, of course, petals, or colored sepals, the 

 showy parts of the flower, for all kinds of plants except the very 

 lowest have the essential parts of a flower, the staminate and pis- 

 tilate elements and mechanism. To state the naturalist's conclu- 

 sion broadly I should say, the floral envelope has been evolved, 



