152 DISPERSION OF POLLEN BY ANIMALS. 



DISPERSION OF POLLEN BY ANIMALS. 



If this book were ornamented with pictorial initial letters illustrative of the 

 contents of each section, we should have at the head of this chapter a group of 

 flowers with bees and butterflies swarming round them, whilst into the scrolls of 

 the capital would be woven a representation of the quiet life of field and forest as 

 manifested on bright summer days — a subject which plays a prominent part in 

 the poetic descriptions and pictorial art of all unsophisticated nations. Even in 

 these days, pictures of butterflies fluttering about bright-coloured flowers, or of bees 

 engaged in collecting the materials for their honey-combs, still find an appreciative 

 public. Young people especially take pleasure in subjects of the kind, and, since 

 youth never entirely dies out, there will always be people who prefer to see 

 the beautiful lines and tints of flowering meadow and shady wood depicted in 

 miniature than the bold outlines of a landscape. If, however, mere casual observa- 

 tion of the relations between flowers and their insect visitors is sufficient to cause 

 aesthetic pleasure, and has stimulated people of every age and nationality to the 

 production of works of art, it may be imagined how great must be the incentive 

 to scientific study supplied by a deeper insight into these phenomena, and what 

 extreme pleasure is derived from the successful discovery of the reasons for these 

 wonderful relations, and from tracing their connection with other facts of science. 

 It may be confidently asserted that the careful investigation of the processes 

 connected with the visits paid by insects and other animals to flowers has brought 

 the solution of the main problems of modern science considerably nearer, and we 

 have good ground for hoping that the prosecution of these researches will succeed 

 before long in raising the veil which still conceals the truth in the case of a number 

 of unexplained phenomena. 



Zoologists are quite justified in their assertion that many of the developments 

 of insects' bodies are correlated with the forms of particular flowers. But equally 

 true is the conclusion to which botanists have arrived that many of the properties 

 of flowers are likewise in correlation with the shape and habits of flower-seeking 

 insects. Now, these flower-loving animals which would perish if for a single 

 year the earth were destitute of blossoms, vary to an extreme degree in size and 

 shape, in the nature of their external coatings, in what they require for nutrition, 

 a,nd in respect of their time of flight, and of a large number of other habits dictated 

 by soil and climate. From the tiny midges to humming-birds, from the thrips, 

 which are scarcely 1 mm. long, and live and die with the flowers, to the gigantic 

 butterflies of Ceylon, Brazil, and New Guinea, whose expanded wings measure 

 16 cm. across, and which flutter cumbrously from flower to flower, a long and 

 graduated series extends which corresponds with a perfectly similar series in the 

 floral world. The diversities of colour in the creatures which visit flowers, the 

 various kinds of mechanism of flight exhibited by beetles, flies, bees, butterflies and 

 birds, the multiplicity of organs by means of which they extract their food from 



