94: THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



blossoms in the vegetable kingdom. But insects 

 must very early have gone about eating pollen 

 on plants, as they do to this day in many in- 

 stances ; and though in itself this would be a 

 loss to the plant, yet plants have often found it 

 well worth their while to pay blackmail to in- 

 sects in return for some benefit incidentally 

 conferred upon them. Again, as the insects flew 

 from plant to plant, they would be sure to carry 

 pollen on their heads and legs ; and they would 

 rub off this pollen on the sticky stigma of the 

 next flower they visited, which would make 

 them on the whole useful and profitable visitors. 

 So the plants, finding the good cross-fertilisation 

 did them, began in time to bribe the insects by 

 producing honey in the neighbourhood of their 

 pistils and stamens, and also to attract their 

 eyes from afar by means of those alluring and 

 brilliantly - coloured advertisements which we 

 call petals. 



I don't mean, of course, that the plants knew 

 they were doing all this ; they were unconscious 

 agents. Whenever any variation in the right 

 direction occurred by chance, natural selection 

 immediately favoured it, so that in the end it 

 comes almost to the same thing as if the plant 

 deliberately intended to allure the insect; and for 

 brevity's sake I shall often so word things. 



How did the plant first come to develop such 

 bright- hued petals ? I think in this way. Most 

 early types of flowers have a great many stamens 

 apiece, and these stamens are so extremely 

 numerous that one or two of them might readily 

 be spared for any other purpose the plant found 



