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But the more ample passage in acaule would suggest the medium-sized Bombus as better adapted as the experiment herewith pictured from my own experience many times would seem to verify, while a honey-bee introduced into the flower failed to fulfil the demonstration, emerging at the little doorway above without a sign of the cordial parting token.
I have repeatedly examined the flowers of C. acaule in their haunts, have observed groups wherein every flower still retained its pollen, others where one or both pollen masses had been withdrawn, and in several instances associated with them I have observed the inflated lip most outrageously bruised, torn, and battered, and occasionally perforated by a large hole.
The most common of the group, the C. acaule, most widely known as the moccasin-flower, whose large, nodding, pale crimson blooms we so irresistibly associate with the cool hemlock woods, will afford a good illustration. The lip in all the cypripediums is more or less sac-like and inflated.
In the present species, C. acaule, however, we see a unique variation, this portion of the flower being conspicuously bag-like, and cleft by a fissure down its entire anterior face. It is only as we see it in side section, or from beneath, that we fully comprehend the disposition of stigma and pollen.
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