SCARLET GERANIUMS. 149 



the flower-stalk, you have artificially imitated the ar- 

 rangement in the scarlet geranium ; only that in the 

 geranium the two parts have actually coalesced, for a 

 reason which I shall try to explain a little later. First, 

 however, let us see how the scarlet pelargonium itself 

 got developed out of a primitive ancestor, something 

 like our own little pink herb-robert. A technical book 

 of botany will tell you, after its dogmatic fashion, that 

 the genus geranium is distinguished from the genus 

 pelargonium by these marks or differentiating peculiari- 

 ties : the geraniums have regular flowers, ten stamens, 

 and five honey-bearing glands on the disk, and they are 

 natives of almost all temperate climates, northern or 

 southern ; the pelargoniums have irregular flowers, with 

 two upper petals different from the remainder, a spurred 

 honey- bearing pouch to the calyx, no glands on the disk, 

 and only about five stamens instead of ten, and they are 

 confined (in their wild state) to the Cape of Good Hope 

 and a few neighboring regions. 



Now all these facts are very significant : they show 

 that the pelargoniums are a highly evolved and special- 

 ized race, produced under peculiar circumstances in a 

 limited tract of country. We know that the competition 

 between flowers for the visits of fertilizing insects is par- 

 ticularly fierce in South Africa ; because from no other 

 district do we get so large a number of our most con- 

 spicuous garden blossoms ; and wherever such strong 

 competition exists, as among the higher Alps and in the 

 Arctic regions, where bees are almost unknown, and 

 butterflies are rare, only the most brilliant and attractive 

 flowers of all succeed in getting fertilized. Under these 

 circumstances, the native geraniums of South Africa 

 have been compelled to specialize themselves into the 

 highly peculiar pelargonium form ; or, to put it more 



