106 FLASHLIGHTS ON NATURE 



the ground, as shown in the illustration, and root 

 every now and again as they proceed, somewhat after 

 the same fashion as strawberry-runners. Like all 

 other clovers, it has trefoil leaves, each of the three 

 leaflets in which is usually marked with a curved 

 spot in the centre resembling a horse-shoe. But 

 it is the flower-heads with which I am here par- 

 ticularly concerned. These are raised on long, 

 erect, leafless stems, each of which bears on its 

 summit a globular head of little white pea-flowers, 

 often delicately tinged with pink or salmon. The 

 flowers are thus lifted to a considerable height, 

 because this clover grows, as a rule, among rather 

 tall grasses, and so tries to push up its blossoms 

 to a height where they may receive the polite 

 attentions of passing insects. 



The visitors for which Dutch clover specially 

 lays itself out are for the most part bees. It dis- 

 dains small pilferers. Each blossom has a long 

 tube enclosing its honey, and only insects with a 

 correspondingly long proboscis can reach its deep 

 store of delicious nectar. It thus saves itself from 

 being riflec} uselessly by small insect riff-raff, such 

 as flies and midges, which might visit the flower, 

 as we botanists call it, " illegitimately " that is to 

 say, might rob the honey without conveying the 

 pollen from the pollen-bags of one head to the 

 sensitive surface or stigma of the next. The parts 

 of the flower, in fact, are specially arranged with a 

 definite relation to the head and the honey-sucking 

 tube of hive bees and wild bees, which cannot 

 visit it without dusting themselves over with pollen 



