Fig. 5.—Butterfly's Proboscis, with Pollen.
Now look at the fragment of a flower in the lower part of the same illustration. Suppose the pollen tuft to stay just where it is when the butterfly comes out of the flower. You can see by looking at the figure that it would strike r in the next flower it entered, and that would do no good; s is the place it should strike; s is the pistil. Now take an orchid flower, if you can get one; if not, look at Fig. 4, and see what will happen. I push into it a sharpened lead-pencil, and it comes out with the pollen tuft standing up as it does on the butterfly's trunk. Watch it a minute. As it dries, the stem of the tuft bends down, toward the point of the pencil. Now push it into another flower. Wait a little while—a minute perhaps—and take the pencil out. You will see that the pollen has been pulled out of its little case. If you tear open the flower, you will find the pollen sticking so tight on the pistil, s, that you can scarcely brush it off. In this upper flower the drawing is from Mr. Darwin's book; but the lower one is one of the flowers in Fig. 2, which I picked off the plant after drawing it, and tried with a pencil myself. r in the lower drawing looks like a little purple velvet pouch swung lightly on its stalk. The pencil came out, leaving the little bag empty, and the pollen glued fast to its side. But they were not glued so fast that they were not pulled off by the next flower that the pencil entered.
Some of the orchids have two pistils, one on each side. In these, if you push into the tube a bristle or needle, the two pollen cases come out as in Fig. 4; as they dry, they spread apart, and bend forward so that both pistils are struck at once as it is pushed into the next blossom. The contrivances by which each orchid receives on just the right spot exactly the right pollen are perfectly marvellous. I have only told you a very few of the simplest facts in regard to the help the insects give to the flowers. Many a poor butterfly goes through life having its proboscis loaded down with the glued-on pollen cases (Fig. 5). It is one of those business arrangements which does not work equally well for both parties. All this is beautiful for the flowers, but it seems rather hard on the butterflies.
[ANIMALS.]
BY JIMMY BROWN.
I should like to be an animal. Not an insect, of course, nor a snake, but a nice kind of animal, like an elephant or a dog with a good master.
Animals are awfully intelligent, but they haven't any souls. There was once an elephant in a circus, and one day a boy said to him, "Want a lump of sugar, old fellow?" The elephant he nodded, and felt real grateful, for elephants are very fond of lump-sugar, which is what they live on in their native forests. But the boy put a cigar instead of a lump of sugar in his mouth.
The sagacious animal, instead of eating up the cigar or trying to smoke it and making himself dreadfully sick, took it and carried it across the circus to a man who kept a candy and cigar stand, and made signs that he'd sell the cigar for twelve lumps of sugar. The man gave the elephant the sugar and took the cigar, and then the intelligent animal sat down on his hind-legs and laughed at the boy who had tried to play a joke on him, until the boy felt that much ashamed that he went right home and went to bed.
In the days when there were fairies—only I don't believe there ever were any fairies, and Mr. Travers says they were rubbish—boys were frequently changed into animals. There was once a boy who did something that made a wicked fairy angry, and she changed him into a cat, and thought she had punished him dreadfully. But the boy after he was a cat used to come and get on her back fence and yowl as if he was ten or twelve cats all night long, and she couldn't get a wink of sleep, and fell into a fever, and had to take lots of castor-oil and dreadful medicines.