S WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1894. 



For example, one of the most interesting and astonishing dis- 

 coveries in botany, and a very recent one, was made by the 

 eminent entomologist C. V. Kiley in the line of his own work, 

 and was that the Yucca plant, a plant belonging to the lily 

 family, is fertilized not by insects in search of food, but by a 

 single insect — a moth, belonging to the genus pronuba — called 

 the yuccasella moth, for the sustenance of its young. This 

 moth gathers the pollen from the anther by the aid of its tenta- 

 cles, rolls it up into a ball under its head, often three times the 

 size of its head, and holds it there with its tentacles. It then 

 flies to the pistil of the flower, pierces it by its ovipositor, a 

 lance-like organ which projects from the tip of its abdomen, 

 lays its eggs through this opening and then runs to the top of 

 the stigma and, by the aid of its tentacles and its tongue, forces 

 the pollen down the stigmatic tube. These eggs hatch in about 

 ten days and, as the fruit swells and grows, the larvae live upon 

 the seeds. As the fruit ripens the larvae bore their way out, 

 descend to the ground by a spider-like thread, bore into the 

 ground a few inches, remain there in a chrysalis state and, in the 

 course of time, come out again as moths. 



The investigations which led to this discovery were made in 

 the Missouri Botanical Gardens, formerly known as the Shaw 

 Gardens, at St. Louis, and these investigations were afterwards 

 continued by Prof. Trelease, Director of the Gardens. 



Two of the most valuable of the works of Charles Darwin, 

 viz.: "Insectivorous Plants" and the "Fertilization of 

 Orchids," were the result of his study of insect life in the Gar- 

 dens of Kew. 



I might cite here also, as another illustration of the interde- 

 pendence of the sciences, that the discovery of the theory of the 

 cellular animal tissue originated fi-om the discovery of the vege- 

 table cellular tissue. Schleiden, the great German botanist, first 

 established the fact of the formation of cells in plants. Schlei- 

 den, soon after his discovery, met Schwann, the perhaps equally 

 eminent i)hysiologist, and told him about it, and they discussed 

 it together, over their beer. As Schwann went home, the 

 thought occurred to him, if plants grow thus why not animals, 

 and following out this thought he made experiments and investi- 



