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PRAIRIE FLOWERS OF LATE AUTUMN. 229 



By the time December comes, and with, it the season for the 

 winter festivals, everybody in the village has his new clothes for 

 the year, and all look neat and trim in fresh brown deer-skins and 

 clean white mittens and breeches. 



PRAIRIE FLOWERS OF LATE AUTUMN. 



By BYRON D. HALSTED, 



PROFESSOR OF BOTANY IN RUTGERS COLLEGE, N. J. 



IT is not easy to satisfactorily decide why some plants bloom in 

 autunm, while others produce their flowers only in spring. 

 To have hepaticas in April is as much a matter of common ex- 

 pectation as for August to bring the first golden-rods and October 

 a gorgeous display of asters. An unwritten law of Nature has 

 been conformed to, and the result is a floral time-piece of the sea- 

 sons, so accurate in its wonderful mechanism that one only needs 

 to see the bouquet of a school-girl returning from her Saturday 

 afternoon ramble in the woods to know the month of the passing 

 year. Some time ago (The Popular Science Monthly, May, 1887) the 

 writer prepared a paper upon " Prairie Flowers of Early Spring," 

 in which it was stated that the first blossoms of the season 

 gained an advantage by being first. There is a mutual adaptation 

 existing between flowers and insects that the most casual observer 

 can not gainsay. It is not only an advantage, but in many cases 

 a positive necessity, that flowers be visited by insects in order to 

 secure that transfer of pollen from one blossom to another which 

 results in fertilization. The modern accepted view of all floral 

 display is that it serves the purpose of attracting insects, and acts 

 as a contrivance by means of which the fertilization of a flower 

 by its own pollen is prevented. Botanists of earlier days did not 

 force this truth upon the attention of others, and many persons 

 better qualified to judge of human than natural history arrived 

 at the erroneous, if not somewhat selfish, conclusion that floral 

 forms and colors were primarily to beautify the earth and render 

 it a pleasant habitation for man. No one can for a moment doubt 

 that flowers are beautiful, but beauty is a secondary matter so far 

 as the gratifying of man's taste for beauty in forms and colors is 

 concerned. It is so planned that the qualities which render the 

 floral structures so well adapted to the peculiarities of the insects 

 are the ones which at the same time render them beautiful and 

 thereby contribute to the pleasure of man. In this adjustment 

 we may see the working of an Infinite Mind able to combine the 

 two elements of utility and beauty so completely that it is not 

 extravagant to say they are often inseparable. 



