106 THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS 



remotely analogous to the musk-like and other odours which 

 exude from the skins of animals ; and the fine colour of the 

 wedding-robes, just like the yellow in some butterflies' wings, 

 is in some cases due to waste products, the ashes of the 

 flowers' hidden fires. 



It cannot be said that we have by any means attained to 

 an understanding of either nectar or fragrance or colour ; we 

 are still children with flowers in our hands, just beginning to 

 know something about them. But we have got past the 

 preliminary stage of giving their insect visitors the whole 

 credit of evolving flowers, which is a little too like crowning 

 snakes for evolving the wisdom of the East ; we are now busy 

 trying to find out what nectar, fragrance, and pigments mean 

 primarily or physiologically in the internal economy of the 

 plant. The poet says of the flower : " It must be the flag 

 of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven " ; the 

 religious mind says : " It is the handkerchief of the Lord, a 

 scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, bearing 

 the owner's name someway in the corners " ; the biologist 

 says : " Overflow of surplus sugar, sublimated vegetable 

 sweat, and literal beauty for ashes " ; but the flower in the 

 crannied wall is a hieroglyph still. 



Summer, we say, is the time of maximum industry, and 

 greatest of all is the unconscious work of the sunlit leaves 

 The results of this are seen in the filling of tubers and 

 rhizomes, corms and bulbs, and other storehouses ; in the 

 formation of next year's buds ; in the making of seeds and 

 the swelling of fruits ; and again, indirectly, in the increased 

 store of potential energy which is thus brought by plants 

 within reach of animal life. The sunbeams dance over the 

 meadow, but some of them are trapped, and their dance is 

 lost in a dance of molecules which change partners in the 

 maze, link themselves in mobile groups, and reach their 

 climax of linkage in complex combinations, some more 



