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Updated: June 4, 2025
Establishment of the Chontales Gold-Mining Company. My house and garden. Fruits. Plantains and bananas; probably not indigenous to America: propagated from shoots: do not generally mature their seeds. Fig-trees. Granadillas and papaws. Vegetables. Dependence of flowers on insects for their fertilisation. Insect plagues. Leaf-cutting ants: their method of defoliating trees: their nests.
Life is like a lordly garden, which it calls forth all the skill of the artist to adorn with exhaustless variety and beauty; or like a spacious park or pleasure-ground, all of whose inequalities are to be embellished, and whose various capacities of fertilisation, sublimity or grace, are to be turned to account, so that we may wander in it for ever, and never be wearied.
Amongst our English flowers there are scores of interesting examples, and I shall describe the fertilisation of one, the common foxglove, on account of the exceeding simplicity with which this object is effected, and to draw the attention of all lovers of nature to this branch of a subject on which the labours of Darwin and other naturalists have of late years thrown a flood of light.
Or if we turn to the plants, which, being motionless, would seem exposed to every fatality, without pausing to consider carnivorous species like the Drusera, which really act as animals, we are struck by the genius that some of our humblest flowers display in contriving that the visit of the bee shall infallibly procure them the crossed fertilisation they need.
The distribution scatters the amassed heap, by which the world around him had been attracted; and although the distribution tends to the general fertilisation of the country, yet with the disappearance, the influence of the possessor, and even his name, are soon forgotten." These remarks, as will appear in the sequel, are apposite to the parties whom I am about to introduce to the readers.
Thus, if the insect or bird that assists in the fertilisation of the vanilla could be introduced into and would live in India, the growers of that plant would be relieved of much trouble, and it might be thoroughly naturalised. Judging from my experience, it would be useless to attempt the acclimature of the scarlet-runner bean in Chontales unless the humble-bee were also introduced.
So far back as 1793, the wonderful work of Sprengel had established, beyond any reasonable doubt, the fact that, in a large number of cases, a flower is a piece of mechanism the object of which is to convert insect visitors into agents of fertilisation.
So in hybrids themselves, there are some which never have produced, and probably never would produce, even with the pollen of either pure parent, a single fertile seed: but in some of these cases a first trace of fertility may be detected, by the pollen of one of the pure parent-species causing the flower of the hybrid to wither earlier than it otherwise would have done; and the early withering of the flower is well known to be a sign of incipient fertilisation.
The fertilisation of the ovules by pollen which falls directly from the anthers on to the stigma can be used as a representation of similar facts in animal physiology. It is very desirable, however, that this study of the vegetable should succeed and not precede that of the domestic animals in the teaching of boys and girls.
His publications on the effects of domestication in plants and animals, on the influence of cross-fertilisation, on flowers as organs for effecting such fertilisation, on insectivorous plants, on the motions of plants, pointed out the routes of exploration which have since been followed by hosts of inquirers, to the great profit of science.
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