THE BEE ORCHIS— continued. 
published in 1862, did as much for the physiology or, as we now call it, the 
natural history of their flowers as Robert Brown had done, thirty years before, for 
their anatomy — showed, by repeated experiment, that pollen brought artificially from 
another flower of the same species has no fertilising effect upon the ovules, while he 
never saw an insect visit the flowers, and found in almost every case that seed was 
set as the result of self-pollination. The two anther-chambers split open soon after 
the flower expands, and the two pear-shaped pollinia, which have long, thin, 
flexible, weak stalks, or caudicles , fall forward over the stigma, to which the least 
breath of wind is sufficient to sway them. Darwin seems to think that, though the 
evidence is all against it, an occasional cross may occur ; but this would hardly 
suffice to explain all the gay colouring and elaborate structure. It seems as if Nature 
had altered her mind, so to say, and having contrived a whole group of flowers 
highly specialised for one purpose, viz. cross-pollination by insects, has made one in 
which, in spite of many such special structures, she has abandoned the main object 
for which they would seem to exist. In other words, whilst the ancestral type of 
Orchidace<£ may well have been entomophilous, the Bee Orchis is a degenerate 
harking back, physiologically though not structurally, to a yet earlier type. The 
plant is a variable one, and it would be interesting to learn whether all its many 
forms on the Continent are self-pollinating, or whether it is possible that the species 
has extended its distributional area beyond that of its insect fertilisers. 
The Bee Orchis is one of a series of plants so frequent on warm, dry, chalky 
soils in the south-east of England that it has been thought to belong to a late 
migration into that region from the Continent or to absolutely require a calcareous 
soil. When it grows on the Upper Lias Clay, as it does in Gloucestershire, we 
have to remember that there is a good deal of lime in that clay ; but it has also been 
found occasionally on sandstones less likely to contain lime at some distance from a 
chalky locality. To such unusual spots its minute seeds may well have been 
carried by wind. 
