32 THE FERTILIZATION OF ORCHIDS. 



to flower, fertilizing all, and acquiring at intervals a new pair 

 of horns, till at last his proboscis becomes useless to himself 

 owing to these appendages (Mr. Darwin saw one unlucky 

 moth with ii) and the poor insect, unable any longer to reach 

 the nectar which is dear to him, perishes miserably — a victim 

 to drink, and the fertilization of orchids. 



This is no chapter of a novel that I am reading to you, 

 but a matter of plain every-day fact, which you can soon 

 verify for yourselves. Gather the first orchis you can find, 

 and push gently into its nectary a pin, a bristle, or the point 

 of a pencil. It will not be long before you can withdraw one 

 or more of the pollen clubs ; watch them carefully and see 

 them put themselves into the very position in which, and in 

 no other, their heads will reach the stigmatic surface of the 

 next flower ; see in the difl"erent orchids different sets of 

 circumstances, met by difl"erent adaptations. See in the 

 Butterfly Orchis, the strong perfume of which comes out only 

 at night, when the moths by which it is fertilized are flying 

 about, and are at once attracted by its powerful smell in a 

 manner in which they never would be by its pale and incon- 

 spicuous flowers — see here the pollen is lying high up out of 

 reach of the proboscis of any insect, and therefore the nectary 

 so long that the insect has to push his head right home into 

 the flower and drag out the pollen-club on his cheeks or his 

 e)^s instead of his nose — but I might go on for ever. 



I will conclude with a few words about Angracuni sesqui- 

 pedale, the gigantic orchid of the Madagascar forests, which 

 I mentioned just now. Picture to yourselves dazzling white 

 six-pointed stars, some six or eight inches in diameter, 

 growing, numbers of them together, from the trunks of the pri- 

 meval trees, and you get an idea of something very wonderful. 

 But — and here comes the great wonder — the nectaries of 

 these orchids are twelve inches to fourteen inches long, 

 which means moths with the proboscis twelve or fourteen 

 inches long for their fertilization. Our largest moth, the 

 Death's Head, has a proboscis not an inch long. Fancy 

 a moth as big as a blackbird * hovering over these flowers, and 



* It does not necessarily follow that a moth possessing a very long pro- 

 boscis must be of gigantic size ; there are moths not one sixth the size of 



