dicates that moths do not go to work in a quite senseless manner.[1]
Nature may be said to have tried this same experiment, but not quite fairly; for Orchis pyramidalis, as shown by Mr. Bentham,[2] often produces monstrous flowers without a nectary, or with a short and imperfect one. Sir C. Lyell sent me several spikes from Folkestone with many flowers in this condition: I found six without a vestige of a nectary, and their pollinia had not been removed. In about a dozen other flowers, having either short nectaries, or with the labellum imperfect, the guiding ridges being either absent or developed in excess and rendered foliaceous, the pollinia in one alone had been removed, and the ovarium of another flower was swelling. Yet I found that the saddle-formed discs in these eighteen flowers were perfect, and that they readily clasped a needle when inserted in the proper place. Moths had removed the pollinia, and had thoroughly fertilised the perfect flowers on the same spikes; so that they must have neglected the monstrous flowers, or, if visiting them, the derangement in the complex mechanism of the parts had hindered the removement of the pollinia, and prevented their fertilisation.
Notwithstanding these several facts I still suspected that nectar must be secreted by our common Orchids,
- ↑ Kurr ('Bedeutung der Nekarien,' 1833, p. 123) cut off the nectaries of fifteen flowers of Gymnadenia conopsea, and they did not produce a single capsule: he also treated in the same manner fifteen flowers of Platanthera or Habenaria bifolia, and these set only five capsules; but then it should be observed that the nectaries of both these orchids contain free nectar. He also cut off the corolla, leaving the nectary, of forty flowers of Orchis morio, and these set no capsules; and this case shows that insects are guided to the flowers by the corolla, Sixteen flowers of Platanthera treated in the same manner bore only one capsule. Similar experiments made by him on Gymnadenia seem to me open to doubt.
- ↑ 'Handbook of the British Flora,' 1858, p. 501.
