ubject
that have yet appeared. Even to the unscientific reader it will prove
full of revelations of this awe-inspiring interassociation and
interdependence of the flower and the insect.

Many years ago the grangers of Australia determined to introduce our
red clover into that country, the plant not being native there. They
imported American seed, and sowed it, with the result of a crop
luxuriant in foliage and bloom, but not a seed for future sowing! Why?
Because the American bumblebee had not been consulted in the
transaction. The clover and the bee are inseparable counterparts, and
the plant refuses to become reconciled to the separation. Upon the
introduction and naturalization of the American bumblebee, however, the
transported clover became reconciled to its new habitat, and now
flourishes in fruition as well as bloom.

Botany and entomology must henceforth go hand-in-hand. The flower must
be considered as an embodied welcome to an insect affinity, and all
sorts of courtesies prevail among them in the reception of their invited
guests. The banquet awaits, but various singular ceremonies are enjoined
between the cup and the lip, the stamens doing the hospitalities in
time-honored forms of etiquette. Flora exacts no arbitrary customs. Each
flower is a law unto itself. And how expressive, novel, and eccentric
are these social customs! The garden salvia, for instance, slaps the
burly bumblebee upon the back and marks him for her own as he is ushered
in to the feast. The mountain-laurel welcomes the twilight moth with an
impulsive multiple embrace. The desmodium and genesta celebrate their
hospitality with a joke, as it were, letting their threshold fall
beneath the feet of the caller, and startling him with an explosion and
a cloud of yellow powder, suggesting the day pyrotechnics of the
Chinese. The prickly-pear cactus encloses its buzzing visitor in a
golden bower, from which he must emerge at the roof as dusty as a
miller. The barberry, in similar vein, lays mischievous hold of the
tongue of its sipping bee, and I fancy, in his early acquaintance,
before he has learned its ways, gives him more of a welcome than he had
bargained for. The evening primrose, with outstretched filaments,
hangs a golden necklace about the welcome murmuring noctuid, while the
various orchids excel in the ingenuity of their salutations. Here is one
which presents a pair of tiny clubs to the sphinx-moth at its threshold,
gluing them to its