81 the moth and the candle 



to ask as neat as possible, it happens that certain species of 

 yucca are still commonly called by the name which the 

 Spaniards gave them: Our Lord's Candle. 



Does Pronuba yuccasella, the moth in question, "de- 

 sire" this particular candle? Please wait until you have 

 heard the whole story before you answer. 



Everybody — or at least everybody old enough to have 

 been a child before directer methods of sex instruction 

 came into fashion — knows about the bees and the flowers. 

 If he did not lose all interest in the subject as he began to 

 realize its remoter personal implications, he probably now 

 knows at least in a very general way that many plants de- 

 pend upon many insects and some, even, upon certain 

 birds, to help them in what the eighteenth century liked to 

 call "their nuptial rites." Orchard growers tend bees prin- 

 cipally to increase their yield of apples and plums and 

 pears; Darwin wrote a classic on the pollination of orchids; 

 the Smyrna fig would not fruit in California until the par- 

 ticular wasp which acts as marriage broker for it in the 

 Near East was imported to perform his function here, etc., 

 etc. 



But in every known case except that of the moth and the 

 candle it is a somewhat one-sided affair with all the "in- 

 tention" being on the part of the flower. Though the insect 

 may be lured by a scent which it likes — even by the stench 

 of rotten meat in the case of certain tropical blossoms pol- 

 linated by flesh-eating flies — and though he may be re- 

 warded with nectar or with edible pollen, he does not do 

 anything directly calculated to fertilize the flow^er. Some- 

 times the flower is.§?> constructed that, for instance, the in- 

 sect cannot get a^the nectar without brushing against the 



% . ^ /- 



'^ . r^^^'^ 



V 



