CHAPTEE III. 



DISADVANTAGEOUS INFLUENCES AND ATTACKS 

 TO WHICH FLOWERS ARE EXPOSED DURING 

 BLOSSOMING. 



On the presumption, that to produce flowers is an 

 advantage to plants, there is an antecedent probability 

 that each plant will do so, and wUl go through the 

 successive stages of the process. But owing to the 

 unceasing interaction which exists between plants and 

 the outer world — ^inorganic nature on the one hand, 

 and the animal kingdom on the other — this flowering 

 process must necessarily be exposed to many possible 

 interferences; in the one case to frost, drought, rain, 

 or similar injurious action of the elements; in the 

 other to the attacks of herbivorous, and therefore flower- 

 destroying, animals. 



As regards the latter, though the dangers from the 

 larger grazing animals, Euminants, Solipedes, etc., etc., 

 are the more conspicuous, yet those incurred from the 

 attacks of smaller kinds, if less apparent, are by no 

 means less real ; from snails, that is, and wood-lice and 

 insects, and from these latter, both in their larval and 

 in their final stages of development. 



