And maidens call it, love-in-idleness."
Even if there is no particular meaning, the "little western flower" gives point and beauty to the lines.
People only began to understand flowers about the year 1793, when Christian Conrad Sprengel, Rector of Spandau, near Berlin, published a very interesting work. He had discovered that the beauty of flowers and their colour and shape were by no means intended solely to please human eyes, but that they were designed to attract and allure the eyes of insects. Before his time there had been many guesses. Indeed, Theophrastus (born 371 B.C., and often mentioned in this work) seems to have quite well understood why flowers produce pollen, and that the fruit would not set and form seed unless pollen was carried to the female part of the flower. He mentions that the Pistacio has both male and female plants, and that Palms only form dates when the pollen is carried to the female tree. This experiment with the Date-palm was tried in 1592 by an Italian (Alpino) in an Egyptian tour, and the Englishman, Jacob Bobart, the Pole, Adam Zaluzianski (the latter in the same year) confirmed the general idea. Then in the year 1694 Rudolp Jacob Camerarius, a German, carried on a few more experiments, but no real definite advance was made until 1793, in the very midst of the French Revolution.[25]
The great point of Sprengel's discovery was in its being an intelligible explanation of the reason why flowers have bright colours, scent, and honey. At his time and indeed for many years afterwards, botanists looked on the stamens, petals, and other parts of the flower exactly in the way that a stamp collector looks at punctures and postmarks, that is without thinking about their meaning. Now we find that they are always designed to fulfil a perfectly definite purpose, and that all their details are contrived accordingly.
This purpose is to carry the pollen from the stamens of one flower to the stigma of another. The pollen can usually be recognized as a yellowish or reddish dust formed in the stamens; this dust is generally rubbed off on an insect's proboscis or on part of its body. When the insect reaches another flower the pollen is scraped off by a sticky or gummy stigmatic surface. When the pollen has been placed on this surface it grows, germinates, and part of it unites with the egg-cell of the young seed.
The latter is then, and not till then, able to become ripe and mature. It may be compared to cross-breeding in animals, though the process does not exactly correspond.
But all flowers do not require insects to carry their pollen. In early geological periods we do not find any flowers like those that now exist, nor in those early times were there any flies, bees, or butterflies.
The cockroach seems to have existed in Silurian (whinstone) times, and many gigantic and extraordinary insects lived in those damp forests of ferns, club-moss, and horsetails, of which the remains now form our British coalfields. Mayflies, plantbugs, and especially dragonflies (some of them with wings two feet across) existed, but none of these insects are of much use as pollen-carriers.
Even much later on, when screw pines, monkey-puzzle trees, ginkgos, and bamboos formed the forests and woods of Europe, crickets and earwigs existed; but it is not until that geological period in which the chalk was formed (the Cretaceous age) that fossil plants like most of those now familiar to us occur. These had flowers intended for insects, and with the fossil plants we find the fossils of the insects that visited them. Bees, butterflies, and ordinary flies appeared upon the scene just as soon as there were flowers ready for them. Mr. Scudder has even found the fossils of certain plants, and with them the fossils of butterflies closely allied to the present butterflies which now live on present trees allied to those fossils!
How then was the pollen of the first flowers carried?