ming,
and its petals assist his comfortable tarrying.

Next to the floral orchids, the mechanism of our milkweed blossom is
perhaps the most complex and remarkable, and illustrates as perfectly as
any of the orchid examples given in Darwin's noble work the absolute
divine intention of the dependence of a plant species upon the visits of
an insect.

Our milkweed flower is a deeply planned contrivance to insure such an
end. It fills the air with enticing fragrance. Its nectaries are stored
with sweets, and I fancy each opening bud keenly alert with conscious
solicitude for its affinity. Though many other flowers manage
imperfectly to perpetuate their kind in the default of insect
intervention, the milkweed, like most of the orchids, is helpless and
incapable of such resource. Inclose this budded umbel in tarlatan gauze
and it will bloom days after its fellow-blooms have fallen, anticipating
its consummation, but no pods will be seen upon this cluster.

What a singular decree has Nature declared with reference to the
milkweed! She says, in plainest terms, "Your pollen must be removed on
the leg of an insect, preferably a bee, or your kind shall perish from
the face of the earth." And what is the deep-laid plan by which this
end is assured? My specimens here on the desk will disclose it all.

Here are two bees, a fly, and a beetle, each hanging dead by its legs
from a flower, an extreme sacrificial penalty, which is singularly
frequent, but which was certainly not exacted nor contemplated in the
design of the flower. A careful search among almost any good-sized
cluster of milkweeds will show us many such prisoners. As in all
flowers, the pollen of the milkweed blossom must come in contact with
its stigma before fruition is possible. In this peculiar family of
plants, however, the pollen is distinct in character, and closely
suggests the orchids in its consistency and disposition. The yellow
powdery substance with which we are all familiar in ordinary flowers is
here absent, the pollen being collected in two club-shaped or, more
properly, spatula-shaped masses, linked in pairs at their slender
prolonged tips, each of which terminates in a sticky disc-shaped
appendage united in V-shape below. These pollen masses are concealed in
pockets (B) around the cylindrical centre of the flower, the discs only
being exposed at the surface, at five equidistant points around its rim,
where they lie in wait for the first unwary foot th