the honeysuckle and the bee are basely
practical and wholly selfish. A butterfly's admiration of a flower is
no whit less than the blossom's conscious appreciation of its own
beauties. There are ants which spend most of their life making
gardens, knowing the uses of fertilizers, mulching, planting seeds,
exercising patience, recognizing the time of ripeness, and gathering
the edible fruit. But this is underground, and the ants are blind.

There is a bird, however--the bower bird of Australia--which appears
to take real delight in bright things, especially pebbles and flowers
for their own sake. Its little lean-to, or bower of sticks, which has
been built in our own Zoological Park in New York City, is fronted by
a cleared space, which is usually mossy. To this it brings its
colorful treasures, sometimes a score of bright star blossoms, which
are renewed when faded and replaced by others. All this has, probably,
something to do with courtship, which should inspire a sonnet.

From the first pre-Egyptian who crudely scratched a lotus on his dish
of clay, down to the jolly Feckenham men, the human race has given to
flowers something more than idle curiosity, something less than mere
earnest of fruit or berry.

At twelve thousand feet I have seen one of my Tibetans with nothing
but a few shreds of straw between his bare feet and the snow, probe
around the south edge of melting drifts until he found brilliant
little primroses to stick behind his ears. I have been ushered into
the little-used, musty best-parlor of a New England farmhouse, and
seen fresh vases of homely, old-fashioned flowers--so recently placed
for my edification, that drops of water still glistened like dewdrops
on the dusty plush mat beneath. I have sat in the seat of honor of a
Dyak communal house, looked up at the circle of all too recent heads,
and seen a gay flower in each hollow eye socket, placed there for my
approval. With a cluster of colored petals swaying in the breeze, one
may at times bridge centuries or span the earth.

And now as I sit writing these words in my jungle laboratory, a small
dusky hand steals around an aquarium and deposits a beautiful spray of
orchids on my table. The little face appears, and I can distinguish
the high cheek bones of Indian blood, the flattened nose and slight
kink of negro, and the faint trace of white--probably of some long
forgotten Dutch sailor, who came and went to Guiana, while New York
City was still a