YELLOW AND ORANGE FLOWERS 



"All variations which render the blossoms more attractive, either by 

 scent, colour, size of corolla, or quantity of nectar, make the insect visit 

 more sure, and therefore the production of seed more likely. Thus, the 

 conspicuous blossoms secure descendants which inherit the special varia- 

 tions of their parents, and so, generation after generation, we have selec- 

 tions in favour of conspicuous flowers, where insects are at work. Their 

 appreciation of colour, because it has brought the blossom possessing it more 

 immediately into their view, and more surely under their attention, has 

 enabled them, through the ages, to be preparing the specimens upon which 

 man now operates ; he taking up the work where they have left it, select- 

 ing, inoculating, and hybridizing, according to his own rules of taste, and 

 developing a beauty which insects alone could never have evolved. His 

 are the finishing touches, his the apparent effects ; yet no less is it true, 

 that the results of his floriculture would never have been attainable with- 

 out insect helpers. It is equally certain, that the beautiful perfume, and 

 the nectar also, are, in their present development, the outcome of repeated 

 insect selection ; and here, it seems to me, we get an inkling of a deep 

 mystery : Why is life, in all its forms, so dependent upon the fusion of two 

 individual elements ? Is it not, that thus the door of progress has been 

 opened? If each alone had reproduced, itself all-in-all, advance would 

 have been impossible; the insect and human florists and pomologists, like 

 the improvers of animal races, would have had no platform for their 

 operation, and not only the forms of life, but life itself would have been 

 stereotyped unalterably, ever mechanically giving repetition to identical 

 phenomena." FRANK R. CHESHIRE in " Bees and Bee-keeping." 

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