The Culmination of Spring 



must be some extra gamey carrion down in its bristly 

 throat, and hurry in to the feast, passing easily over the 

 stiff bristles that point inwards in the narrowed portion of 

 the passage. But once in they find these fleshy hairs 

 prevent their getting out again, and on a sunny day the 

 large chamber soon gets filled with flies, chiefly the bur- 

 nished, green-tailed Lucilia Caesar. The females lay quan- 

 tities of eggs on the walls, and in a few days the interior 

 is a putrid mass of dead flies and crawling maggots, and 

 the desired ends of both fly and flower are defeated. For 

 the maggots soon starve for want of more food than is 

 supplied by the bodies of their defunct parents, and the 

 ovaries of the flower are rotted by the damp mass. I 

 suppose in its native Corsican home things happen dif- 

 ferently. Probably it is visited by some more strongly 

 built insect perhaps even carrion-feeding beetles, whose 

 strength helps them to struggle out more easily when the 

 pollen is shed and the stiff bristles begin to grow flaccid ; or 

 again a larger number of plants in flower at one time would 

 mean more accommodation for carrion-loving visitors, and 

 the suffocating crowding of the inner chamber would be 

 avoided. In English gardens there are seldom more than 

 two of the flowers open on the same day, and there is no 

 lack of flies at their period of flowering. I like astonishing 

 people who have not seen this flower before by cutting 

 away a portion of the wall of the lower chamber and 

 allowing the entrapped flies to escape. After a fine morn- 

 ing there will generally be enough of them inside to make 

 a good swarm and to take a minute or two to buzz out of 

 an opening an inch square. I have never seen it set any 

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