Flowers and their Pedia-rces. 



But the original bright coloured ancestor of the 

 daisy must have had five separate petals, like the 

 dog-rose or the apple-blossom at the present day. 

 How then did these petals grow together into a single 

 bell-shaped corolla, as we see them now in the finished 

 daisy ? Well, the stages and the reasons are not 

 difficult to guess. As flowers and insects went on 

 developing side by side, certain flowers learnt to 

 adapt themselves better and better to their special 

 insects, while the insects in return learnt to adapt 

 themselves better and better to their special flowers. 

 As bees and butterflies got a longer proboscis with 

 which to dive after honey into the recesses of the 

 blossoms, the blossoms on their part got a deeper 

 tube in which to hide their honey from all but the 

 proper insects. Sometimes this is done, as in the 

 larkspur, the violet, and the garden nasturtium, by 

 putting the honey at the bottom of a long spur or 

 blind sac ; and if you bite off the end of the sac in 

 the nasturtium you will find a verj- appreciable quan- 

 tity of nectar stored up in it But most highly spe- 

 cialised flowers have hit upon a simpler plan, which 

 is to run all their petals together at the bottom into a 

 tube, so long that no useless insect can rob the honey 

 without fertilising the plant, and so arranged that the 

 proboscis of the bee or butterfly can rub against the 



