FLORAL MECHANISMS 125 



they can easily enter the slit of a pollen-chamber on 

 another flower. 



The insects seem to learn nothing from their un- 

 pleasant entanglements, for they fly to a new flower 

 and repeat their exploits with this difference, how- 

 ever : When their hind legs enter the slotted open- 

 ing, they drag the pollen masses into the pollen- 

 chamber and leave them there at the stigmatic open- 

 ing, where they will give life to the ovaries within. 



Truth compels me to state that the action de- 

 scribed does not occur for every visit, nor yet once 

 in very many visits. On a flower-head I examined 

 there were forty blossoms, and each one received 

 the visits of at least twenty insects, making eight 

 hundred chances for fertilisation to take place; 

 yet this plant made but two seed-pods. But none 

 can deny that the mechanism works sufficiently 

 well to propagate the milkweed plentifully and 

 lustily. 



Fritz Miiller gives a sketch of a butterfly's legs 

 laden with no less than eleven bunches of pollen, 

 or spring clips, and Mr. Wood, the botanist, re- 

 ceived from a bee-grower of California a box of 

 bees whose legs were so clustered with milkweed 

 pollen that they could not do their work, and were 

 supposed to be the victims of some disease, or to 

 bear some strange fungous growth. 



