My Studio Neighbors

Look where we will among the blossoms, we find the same beautiful plan of intercommunion and reciprocity everywhere demonstrated. The means appear without limit in their evolved--rather, I should say, involved--ingenuity. Pluck the first flower that you meet in your stroll to-morrow, and it will tell you a new story. Only a few days since, while out on a drive, I passed a luxuriant clump of the plant known as "horse-balm." I had known it all my life, and twenty years previously had made a careful analytical drawing of the mere botanical specimen. What could it say to me now in my more questioning mood? Its queer little yellow-fringed flowers hung in profusion from their spreading terminal racemes. I recalled their singular shape, and the two outstretched stamens protruding from their gaping corolla, and could distinctly see them as I sat in the carriage. I had never chanced to read of this flower in the literature of cross-fertilization, and murmuring, half aloud, "What pretty mystery is yours, my Collinsonia?" prepared to investigate. What I observed is pictured severally at Fig. 9, the flowers being shown from above, showing the two spreading stamens and the decidedly exceptional unsymmetrical position of the long style extending to the side. A small nectar-seeking bumblebee had approached, and in alighting upon the fringed platform grasped the filaments for support, and thus clapped the pollen against his sides. Reasoning from analogy, it would of course be absolutely clear that this pollen has thus been deposited where it will come in contact with the stigma of another flower. So, of course, it proved. In the bee's continual visits to the several flowers he came at length to the younger blooms, where the forked stigmas were turned directly to the front, while the immature stamens were still curled up in the flower tubes. Even the unopened buds showed a number of species where the early matured stigma actually protruded through a tiny orifice in precisely the right position to strike the pollen-dusted body of the bee, as he forced his tongue through the tiny aperture.[A]