22 COLIN CLOUTS CALENDAR. 



with flowers all the year round, from the celandines of 

 spring, with their little clustered pill-like nodules, through 

 the tuberous orchids and thick white-rooted dandelions 

 of summer, to the bulbous squills and lady's-tresses of 

 late autumn. When one thinks of them all packed away 

 side by side in the interstices of the stones and grasses, 

 one begins to understand what is meant by the struggle 

 for life in the world of plants. 



The wild hyacinth is very essentially a bee-flower, 

 one of the kinds which have specially adapted themselves 

 to that one peculiar mode of insect fertilisation. Its 

 colour alone might give one a hint of its nature ; for blue 

 is the special hue affected by bees, and developed for the 

 most part by their selective agency. All the simplest 

 and most primitive flowers are yellow ; those a little 

 above them in the scale have usually become white ; 

 those rather more evolved are generally red or pink ; 

 and the highest grade of all, the blossoms peculiarly 

 modified for bees and butterflies, are almost always blue 

 or purple. Now, one cannot look closely at a wild 

 hyacinth without perceiving that it has undergone a 

 good deal of modification. It is, in fact, a very high 

 type of its own class. It belongs to that great family 

 of flowers whose parts were originally arranged in rows 

 of threes : but this original arrangement it almost seems 

 at first sight to have doubled. Count the parts, and you 

 will find that it has now six blue petals, with six stamens, 

 one stamen being gummed on, as it were, to each petal ; 

 while in the middle there is a single unripe pale-blue 

 seed-vessel. But in the primitive ancestor of all these 

 trinary flowers one-half of all flowering plants there 



