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teresting things that nearly everyone forgets. It is just this 

 quality of forever fixing in one's mind the fertilization of Vallis- 

 neria that has made the printing of this essay a privilege. 



N. T.] 



"We must not leave the aquatic plants without briefly men- 

 tioning the life of the most romantic of them all: the legendary 

 Vallisneria, an hydrocharad whose nuptials form the most tragic 

 episode in the love-history of the flowers. The Vallisneria is a 

 rather insignificant herb, possessing none of the strange grace of 

 the water-lily or of certain submersed verdant plants. But it 

 seems as though nature had delighted in giving it a beautiful 

 idea. Its whole existence is spent at the bottom of the water, in 

 a sort of half-slumber, until the wedding-hour comes, when it 

 aspires to a new life. Then the female plant slowly uncoils the 

 long spiral of its peduncle, rises, emerges, and floats and blossoms 

 on the surface of the pond. From a neighboring stem, the male 

 flowers, which see it through the sunlit water rise in their turn, 

 full of hope, towards the one that rocks, that awaits them, that 

 calls them to a fairer world. But when they have come half- 

 way, they feel themselves suddenly held back: their stalk, the 

 very source of their life, is too short; they will never reach the 

 abode of light, the only spot in which the union of the stamens 

 and pistils can be achieved ! " 



"Is there any more cruel inadvertance or ordeal in nature? 

 Picture the tragedy of that longing, the inaccessible so nearly 

 attained, the transparent fatality, the impossible with not a 

 visible obstacle! It would be insoluble, like our own tragedy 

 upon this earth, were it not that an unexpected element is 

 mingled with it. Did the males foresee the disillusion to which 

 they would be subjected? One thing is certain, that they have 

 locked up in their hearts a bubble of air, even as we lock up in 

 our souls a thought of desperate deliverance. It is as though 

 they hesitated for a moment; then with a magnificent effort, 

 the finest, the most supernatural that I know of in all the pa- 

 geantry of the insects and the flowers, in order to rise to happiness 

 they deliberately break the bond that attaches them to life. 

 They tear themselves from their peduncle and, with an incom- 



