34 Flowers and their Unbidden Guests. 



inexhaustible multiplicity^ are the allurements to visits 

 and the means of protection against them. The diver- 

 sity of the latter is so much the greater, inasmuch as the 

 flowers of one kind of plant are not subject to the dis- 

 advantageous attacks of only one kind of animal, but to 

 the attacks of animals of the most various forms ; 

 great and small ; vringed or wingless ; flying or creep- 

 ing ; biting or sucking ; with a soft slimy skin, or 

 armed with a layer of chitin and regardless of points 

 and prickles ; some greedy after one part of the flower, 

 some after another. 



On this account it happens very often that one 

 single method of protection is insufficient, and that a 

 plant, in order to preserve its flowers, allow them to 

 blossom without disturbance, and let each part perform 

 its right function, must be provided with two, three, or 

 even more means of protection against animals of such 

 various form and size. 



But in spite of this great complication, and in spite 

 of the extraordinary variety of the arrangements which 

 we are justified in considering as means of protec- 

 tion against unbidden guests, we may perceive that 

 certain types of defence, certain definite mechanisms 

 and arrangements, are always repeating themselves, and 

 that it is quite possible in a descriptive account to 

 bring order into this chaos, and to arrange the different 

 means of protection into general groups. From this 

 point of view it is curious to remark that one and the 



