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, ami tlierefore the production of seed more likely. Thus, the 

 conspicuous blossoms secure descendants 7vhich inherit the special varia- 

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

 tions in favour of conspicuous flowers, ivhere insects are at 7vork. Their 

 appreciation of colour, because it has brought t/ie blossom possessing it more 

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

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

 man no7v operates : he taking up the work inhere they have left it, select- 

 ing, inoculating, and hybridizing, according to his 07vn rules of taste, and 

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

 are the finishing touches, his the apparent eff^ects ; 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 tlie 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 : IVhy 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, ivould have had no platform for their 

 operation, and not onlv 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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