VOL. LIX— NO. 1 2 



HAMILTON, ILL., DECEMBER, 1919 



MONTHLY, $1.00 A YFAR 



NECTAR AND NECTAR SECRETION 



By Dr. Wm. Trelease, Botanist, University of Illinois. 



THE great Swedish botanist, Lin- 

 naeus, nearly two hundred years 

 ago, basing his classification of 

 plants on their flowers, found it 

 necessary to name and account for 

 all of the parts of a flower. In many 

 cases he found structures that were 

 neither sepals, petals, stamens nor 

 pistils ; and as these contained or 

 were wet with a sweet fluid, he gave 

 this the fanciful name nectar — the 

 drink of the gods — and called the 

 parts of the flower that produced or 

 contained it, nectaries. 



As these nectaries were differenr 

 from stamens and pistils, which Lin- 

 naeus recognized as the sexual or- 

 gans of flowers, though they are 

 sometimes connected with them, and 

 as they were different from ordinary 

 sepals and petals, though sometimes 

 connected with them, they presented 

 something of a question mark to the 

 men of that day who were curious to 

 know what the parts of a plant really 

 are and what they do. For this rea- 

 son the study of nectaries became 

 something of a popular diversion for 

 a generation or two; and a general 

 idea that they are organs for secret- 

 ing sugar became established; not 

 necessarily an idea of secretion, 

 though, for just as animals excrete 

 various organic substances that are 

 by-products, or waste from some of 

 their functions, so it was thought by 

 some students that the sugar of nec- 

 tar might really be an excreted 

 waste or surplus rather than a sub- 

 stance secreted because it is to be- 

 vome useful to the plant. 



Toward the end of the Eighteenth 

 Century a German rector, Sprengel, 

 who seems to have found in Nature a 

 good deal of inspiration that he 

 failed to put over, noticed that the 

 petals of the common German wild 

 geranium were fringed with hairs at 

 their bases. That was in the day 

 before men believed in evolution, but 

 when they did believe in a purpose- 

 ful creation. Sprengel was convinced 

 that an all-wise Creator would not 



have made a single hair in vain, and 

 he set about discovering what these 

 hairs were for,. 'much as a sensible 



Honeybee on Hedge Nettle. 

 (Photographed by Professor C. F. Hottes). 



person seeing the governor on an 

 engine today would try to find out 

 what it is for. Below the break be- 

 tween two petals, he found a nectar 

 gland, producing its sugary fluid; and 

 he saw the hairs would prevent the 

 nectar from being diluted or washed 

 away by rain or dew. This brought 

 him back to the original question — 

 what nectaries and nectar are for. 

 He got his answer to this by watch- 

 ing the plant and seeing that bees 

 visited the flowers, and removed the 

 nectar as what might be called the 

 raw materials of the honey industry. 



In Sprengel's day, the general im- 

 pression was not only that things 

 have been created just as we find 

 them, but created for our own ulti 

 mate good. So Srrengel found an 

 answer in discovering that the hair 

 fringe of the geranium petals pro- 

 tects the nectar of the flowers and s > 

 [.reserves it for bees to use in manu- 

 factiiing honey for our breakfast ta- 

 ble. 



It is not necessary to walk down 

 Michigan Boulevard on a windy day 

 to realize that we belong to an ini- 

 tiative race. The corner grocery 

 and the drug store show it as well as 

 the windows of milliners and dress- 

 makers, shoe shops and news stands, 

 or as the sights that isue from a bar- 

 ber shop in a college town. 



When you stop to think about .t, 

 Sprengel could hardly have had the 

 curiosity to study out his geranium 

 question to an answer without be- 

 ing spurred to look at other flowers 

 to see if they might not have some- 

 thing interesting of the same sort to 

 offer. He yielded to the impulse to 

 look at other flowers, and he found 

 his geranium to be a very drab speci- 

 men compared with some of the ir- 

 regular and painted flowers that he 

 studied out in the same way. He 

 must have felt no common pride 

 when, in 1793, he published the re- 

 sults of his studies, with simple but 

 effective illustrations, under a title 

 that meant the discovered secret of 



