196 THE HAUNTS OF LIFE 
flower-visiting insects, which carry the fer- 
tilising golden dust or pollen from blossom 
to blossom. This is certainly one of the most 
important linkages in the world. 
Darwin’s “ Cats and Clover” Story. —In his 
immortal book, The Origin of Species (1859), 
Charles Darwin told the story of the connec- 
tion between cats and clover—a story that soon 
went round the world. It is a very familiar 
story, but it should not become trite to us, for 
it was the first vivid story of its kind, and it 
was told by the greatest of all naturalists. 
Darwin took one hundred heads of the big 
purple clover and put muslin bags round 
them, so that the air and the sunshine could 
get in, but no humble-bees, which he knew to 
be the usual visitors of the clover. From these 
plants he got not a single seed, while from 
another hundred heads close by, to which the 
bees had access, he got 27,000 seeds. The fer- 
tilising dust or pollen which the bees carry 
from one clover blossom to another makes the 
possible seeds into real seeds, that is to say, 
embryo plants. A nucleus from the pollen- 
grain, which grows down the pistil of the 
flower to the ovules, fertilises an egg-cell in- 
side the ovule, and as this develops into an 
