FOES IK THE HAYFIELD. 97 



fertilization by the oddest and most improbable methods. 

 The common snapdragon, for example, has the mouth 

 of its blossom tightly closed by a projecting palate, so as 

 to exclude all insects except the correlated kind of bee, 

 whose weight as he lights on the lip suffices to press 

 down the door and give aim access to the sealed tube, 

 with its nectar secreted in a little pouch at the far end. 

 As soon as he flies away the palate snaps back again, and 

 closes the entrance once more till another bee presents 

 himself on the threshold. The yellow-rattle has just as 

 complicated an arrangement on a smaller scale, with an 

 arched and flattened upper lip, flanked by two purple- 

 spotted wings, as well as a lobed lower lip, deeply 

 divided into three distinct segments. The flowers are 

 minutely arranged for fertilization by bees ; and the 

 insect is obliged to thrust his proboscis between the 

 closely locked and hairy stamens in order to get at the 

 honey. In doing so, he necessarily shakes out the pol- 

 len, which he carries away with him on his head to the 

 next blossom. 



In a very plastic and variable family such as this, 

 the general plasticity seems to affect every part of the 

 plant. While the flowers still preserve throughout the 

 same fundamental botanical type, they vary so much 

 from kind to kind in all conspicuous outer peculiarities 

 that a casual observer would probably fail to see any 

 resemblance at all between them. Even this little minor 

 group of half-parasitic root-suckers has several different 

 shapes of flowers, each adapted in a particular fashion of 

 its own to insect fertilization. Again, their coloring 

 varies widely. If you take a very simple and primitive 

 group like the buttercups, you will find dozens of species 

 all of the same golden yellow, and all uniformly colored 

 in every part of the flower. But if you take a family 



