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In temperate latitudes we find many flowers fertilised by insects, attracted by honey-bearing nectaries; and in tropical America not only bees, moths, and other large insects carry the pollen from one flower to another, but many flowers, like the Marcgravia, are specially adapted to secure the aid of small birds, particularly humming-birds, for this purpose.
And, lastly, that the anthers and stigmas are real animals, attached indeed to their parent tree like polypi or coral insects, but capable of spontaneous motion; that they are affected with the passion of love, and furnished with powers of reproducing their species, and are fed with honey like the moths and butterflies, which plunder their nectaries. See Botanic Garden, Part I. add. note XXXIX.
The moths, which fly by night, have a much longer proboscis rolled up under their chins like a watch spring; which they extend to collect the honey from flowers in their sleeping state; when they are closed, and the nectaries in consequence more difficult to be plundered.
This particular blossom would thus be both barren and sterile. None of its pollen would be carried to other stigmas, nor would it set a seed to perpetuate by inheritance its shorter nectary. Again, let us suppose the variation of an extra long nectary, and the writer recently saw a number of these orchids with nectaries thirteen inches in length.
Thus our common English vetch secretes a little honey on the stipules or wing-like leaflets on the stem, and so distracts thieving ants from committing their depredations upon the nectaries in the flowers, which are intended for the attraction of the fertilising bees; and a South American acacia, as Mr.
The wire, of iron and brass, lurked in a little drawer of the table before her. "Under her eyes, in a Venetian glass, shaped like a flower-cup on its stem, was the living model she strove to imitate. She had a passion for achievement; she attempted the most difficult things, close racemes, the tiniest corollas, heaths, nectaries of the most variegated hues.
These are the conditions expressed; and how admirably they are fulfilled we may observe when we examine flower after flower of a group, and find their nectaries drained, their anther cells empty, and pollen upon all their stigmas.
In Aconitum, monkshood, the nectaries stand upright like two horns covered with a hood, which abounds with such acrid matter that no insects penetrate it. In Helleborus, hellebore, the many nectaries are placed in a circle, like little pitchers, and add much to the beauty of the flower.
After impregnation the flower undergoes a remarkable change, the nectaries drop off, but the white corol remains, and gradually becomes quite green.
"I believe some of them capture insects at certain times, but as a rule these lovely little birds live upon the honey they suck from the nectaries of these trumpet-shaped blossoms; and their bills are long and thin so that they can reach right to the end.
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