38 Who painted the flowers ? 



ground of sestheticism. Can it then be said that blue 

 flowers are pre-eminently honey-bearing? It would be 

 hard to know what blue flowers could be meant. In a 

 rolling sea of blue Hyacinths we shall not find as many 

 bees at work as in the inconspicuous green tassels of the 

 Sycamore overhead ; while the Heather and Mignonette 

 will certainly compare not unfavourably with the Speed- 

 well and Harebell, and even with the Sage and other 

 labiates, "perhaps the most specialized of any flowers 

 so far as regards insect fertilization." 1 



In view of these instances, therefore, and of many 

 others such as these, I maintain that the insect theory 

 is, to say the least, not proven. And if we turn to some 

 considerations of a more general nature, its position will 

 certainly not be improved. 



In the first place, even supposing, for the sake of 

 argument, that all development in flowers of colour and 

 form and nectaries has been produced by the agency of 

 insects, yet for development we need the thing to be 

 developed : and whence came that? Granted that the 

 bees painted the flowers, who supplied the paints ? A 

 pink blush, it is said, appearing on the petal of a rose 

 made it more attractive than it was when pure white, and 

 so the pink blush was gradually developed to crimson. 

 But whence the pink blush ? The bees did not make 

 that. And whence its power of developing to crimson ? 

 All the bees in the world could not develop an agate 

 into a ruby. And therefore there must be something for 

 which they are not responsible, and that something the 



1 It is remarkable to what length the imperious demands of 

 theory will go, and how far one theory will prove inconvenient to 

 another. In his essay on the colour of flowers, wherein he traces 

 the process of development according to this indication alone, or 

 at any rate chiefly, Mr. Allen comes to the conclusion (p. 32) that 

 the Ranunculacea, or Buttercup family, are the most primitive of 

 all dicotyledons and "perhaps best of all, preserve for us the 

 original features of the early dicotyledonous flowers." Yet it is 

 precisely the Ranunculacea which botanists who judge by structure 

 have unanimously set down as the most developed of all dicotyledons, 

 that is as the furthest removed from monocotyledons. 



