White and Greenish 



Now, the true flowers of the arum and all its spadix-bearing 

 kin are so minute that one scarcely notices them where they are 

 clustered on the club-shaped column in the centre of the apparent 

 "flower." The beautiful white banner of the marsh calla, or the 

 green and maroon striped pulpit from which Jack preaches, is no 

 more the flower proper than the papery sheath below the daffodil 

 is the daffodil. In the arum the white advertisement flaunted before 

 flying insects is not even essential to the florets' existence, except 

 as it helps them attract their pollen-carrying friends. Almost all 

 waterside plants, it will be noticed, depend chiefly upon flies and 

 midges, and these lack aesthetic taste. " Such plants have usually 

 acquired small and inconspicuous separate flowers," says Grant 

 Allen ; " and then, to make up for their loss in attractiveness, like 

 cheap sweetmeats, they have very largely increased their num- 

 bers. Or, to put the matter more simply and physically, in 

 waterside situations those plants succeed best which have a rela- 

 tively large number of individually small and unnoticeable flowers 

 massed together into large and closely serried bundles. Hence, 

 in such situations, there is a tendency for petals to be suppressed, 

 and for blossoms to grow minute ; because the large and bright 

 flowers seldom succeed in attracting big land insects like bees or 

 butterflies, while the small and thick-set ones usually do succeed 

 in attracting a great many little flitting midges." Flies, which are 

 guided far more by their sense of smell than by sight, resort to 

 the petalless, insignificant florets of the ill-scented marsh calla in 

 numbers ; and as the uppermost clusters are staminate only, while 

 the lower florets contain stamens and pistil, it follows they must 

 often effect cross-pollination as they crawl over the spadix. But 

 here is no trap to catch the tiny benefactors such as is set by wicked 

 Jack-in-the-pulpit, or the skunk-cabbage, or another cousin, a still 

 more terrible executioner, the cuckoo-pint (Arum maculatum) of 

 Europe. 



Few coroner's inquests are held over the dead bodies of our 

 feathered friends ; and it is not known whether the innocent-look- 

 ing marsh calla really poisons the birds on which it depends to 

 carry its bright seeds afar or not. The cuckoo-pint, as is well 

 known, destroys the winged messenger bearing its offspring to 

 plant fresh colonies in a distant bog, because the decayed body of 

 the bird acts as the best possible fertilizer into which the seedling 

 may strike its roots. Most of our noxious weeds, like our vermin, 

 have come to us from Europe ; but Heaven deliver us from this 

 cannibalistic pest ! 



The very common Green Arrow-arum (Peltandra Virginica), 

 found in shallow water, ditches, swamps, and the muddy shores of 

 ponds throughout the eastern half of the United States, attracts us 

 more by its stately growth and the beauty of its bright, lustrous 

 green arrow-shaped leaves (which have been found thirty inches 



156 



