THE MEADOW BEAUTY. 



99 



writer, says, "Thus, to take a few examples out of hundreds that 

 might be cited, the flowers which lay themselves out for fertiliz- 

 ation by miscellaneous small flies, are almost always white ; those 

 which depend upon the beetles are generally yellow ; while those 

 which bid for the favor of bees and butterflies are usually red, 

 purple, lilac or blue. Down to the minutest distinctions between 

 species, this correlation of flowers to the tastes of their particular 

 guests seems to hold good. Herman Miiller notes that the com- 

 mon galium of our heaths and hedges is white, and is visited by 

 small flies, while its near relative, the lady's bedstraw, is yellow, 

 and owes its fertilization to little beetles. Fritz Mtiller noticed a 

 lantana in South America, which changes color as its flowering 

 advances; and he observed that each kind of butterfly which 

 visited it, stuck rigidly to its own favorite color, waiting to pay its 

 addresses until that color appeared." 



We thus see how the special tastes of insects may have become 

 the selective agency for developing white, pink, red, purple and 

 blue petals, from the original yellow ones. But, before they could 

 exercise such a selective action, the petals must themselves have 

 shown some tendency to vary in certain fixed directions. An 

 investigator, who has given much study to the coloring matter of 

 plants and its chemical nature and action, gives us a point here, 

 which will, perhaps, solve this part of our problem. He assures 

 us that the pigments for all of these colors are laid up in all plants, 

 and only need to be slightly modified in chemical constitution, in 

 order to make them into the blues, pinks, and purples, with which 

 we are familiar. 



Another reason for supposing that the evolution of color in 

 flowers has been along the line indicated above, is, that we see 



