150 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



of them are far more minutely adapted for special 

 insect fertilisation than their earlier allies. They 

 include the so-called Guernsey lilies of our gardens, 

 as well as the huge American aloes which all visitors 

 to the Riviera know so well on the dry hills around 

 Nice and Cannes. The iris family are a similar but 

 rather more advanced tribe, with only three stamens 

 instead of six, their superior organisation allowing 

 them readily to dispense with half their complement, 

 and so to attain the perfect trinary symmetry of three 

 sepals, three petals, three stamens, and three ovaries. 

 Among them, the iris and the crocus are circular in 

 shape, but some very advanced types, such as the 

 gladiolus, have acquired a bilateral form, in correla- 

 tion with special insect visits. From these, the step 

 is not great to the orchids, undoubtedly the highest 

 of all the trinary flowers, with the triple arrangement 

 almost entirely obscured, and with the most extra- 

 ordinary varieties of adaptation to fertilisation by 

 bees or even by humming-birds in the most marvel- 

 lous fashions. Alike by their inferior ovary, their 

 bilateral shape, their single stamen, their remarkable 

 forms, their brilliant colours, and their occasional 

 mimicry of insect life, the orchids show themselves 

 to be by far the highest of the trinary flowers, if not, 

 indeed, of the entire vegetable world. 



