THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 1^^ 



ate than they reahzed, because every flower really is a 

 group of sex organs which the plants have glorified while 

 the animals — surprisingly enough, as many have observed 

 — usually leave the corresponding items of their own anat- 

 omy primitive, unadorned and severely functional. The 

 ape, whose behind blooms in purple and red, represents 

 the most any of the higher animals has achieved along this 

 hue and even it is not, by human standards, any great 

 aesthetic success. At least no one would be likely to main- 

 tain that it rivals either the poppy or the orchid. 



In another respect also plants seem to have been more 

 aesthetically sensitive than animals. They have never tol- 

 erated that odd arrangement by which the same organs 

 are used for reproduction and excretion. Men, from St. 

 Bernard to William Butler Yeats, have ridiculed or scorned 

 it and recoiled in distaste from the fact that, as Yeats put 

 it, "love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excre- 

 ment." As a matter of fact, the reptiles are the only back- 

 boned animals who have a special organ used only in mat- 

 ing. Possibly — though improbably, I am afraid — if this fact 

 were better known it might be counted in favor of a gen- 

 erally unpopular group. 



All this we now know and, appropriately enough, much 

 of it — especially concerning the sexuality of plants — was 

 first discovered during the eighteenth-century Age of .Gal- 

 lantry. No other age would have been more disposed to 

 hail the facts with delight and it was much inclined to 

 expound the new knowledge in extravagantly gallant 

 terms. One does not usually think of systematizers as given 

 to rhapsody, but Linnaeus, who first popularized the fact 

 that plants can make love, wrote rhapsodically of their 

 nuptials : 



