What a contrast this winged botany of to-day to that of a hundred years ago! The flower now no longer the mere non-committal, structural, botanical specimen. No longer the example of mere arbitrary, independent creation, reverently and solely referred to the orthodox "delight of man." The blossom whose unhappy fate was bemoaned by the poet because, forsooth, it must needs "blush unseen," or "waste its sweetness on the desert air," is found alone in that musty hortus siccus of a blind and deluded past. From the status of mere arbitrary creation, however "beautiful," "curious," "eccentric," hitherto accepted alone on faith—"it is thus because it is created thus: what need to ask the reason why?"—it has become a part of our inspiring heritage, a reasonable, logical, comprehensible result, a manifestation of a beautiful divine scheme, and is thus an ever-present witness and prophet of divine care and supervision.
The flower of to-day! What an inspiration to our reverential study! What a new revelation is borne upon its perfume! Its forms and hues, what invitations to our devotion! This spot upon the petal; this peculiar quality of perfume or odor; this fringe within the throat; this curving stamen; this slender tube! What a catechism to one who knows that each and all represent an affinity to some insect, towards whose vital companionship the flower has been adapting itself through the ages, looking to its own more certain perpetuation!
The great Linnæus would doubtless have claimed to "know" the "orchid," which perhaps he named. Indeed, did he not "know" it to the core of its physical, if not of its physiological, being? But could he have solved the riddle of the orchid's persistent refusal to set a pod in the conservatory? Could he have divined why the orchid blossom continues in bloom for weeks and weeks in this artificial glazed tropic—perhaps weeks longer than its more fortunate fellows left behind in their native haunts—and then only to wither and perish without requital? Know the orchid?—without the faintest idea of the veritable divorce which its kidnapping had involved!
Thanks to the new dispensation, we may indeed claim a deeper sympathy with the flower than is implied in a mere recognition of its pretty face. We know that this orchid is but the half of itself, as it were; that its color, its form, however eccentric and incomprehensible, its twisted inverted position on its individual stalk-like ovary, its slender nectary, its carefully concealed pollen—all are anticipations of an insect complement, a long-tongued night-moth perhaps, with whose life its own is mysteriously linked through the sweet bond of perfume and nectar, and in the sole hope of posterity.
And the flower had been stolen from its haunt while its consort slept, and had awakened in a glazed prison—doubtless sufficiently comfortable, save for the absence of that one indispensable counterpart, towards whom we behold in the blossom's very being the embodied expression of welcome.
Blooming day after day in anticipation of his coming, and week after week still hoping against hope, we see the flower fade upon its stalk, and with what one might verily believe to be evidences of disconsolation, were it not that the ultra-scientist objects to such a sentimental assumption with regard to a flower, which is unfortunate enough to show no sign of nerves or gray matter in its composition. Who shall claim to know his orchid who knows not its insect sponsor?
To take one of our own wild species. Here is the Arethusa bulbosa of Linnæus, for instance. Its pollen must reach its stigma—so he supposed—in order for the flower to become fruitful. But this is clearly impossible, as the pollen never leaves its tightly closed box unless removed by outside aid, which aid must also be required to place it upon the stigma. This problem, which confronted him in practically every orchid he met, Linnæus, nor none of his contemporaries, nor indeed his followers for many years, ever solved.
Not until the time of Christian Conrad Sprengel (1735) did this and other similar riddles begin to be cleared up, that distinguished observer having been the first to discover in the honey-sipping insect the key to the omnipresent mystery. Many flowers, he discovered, were so constructed or so planned that their pollen could not reach their own stigmas, as previously believed. The insect, according to Sprengel, enjoyed the anomalous distinction of having been called in, in the emergency, to fulfil this apparent default in the plain intentions of nature, as shown in the flower. Attracted by the color and fragrance of the blossom, with their implied invitation to the assured feast of nectar, the insect visited the flower, and thus became dusted with the pollen, and in creeping or flying out from it conveyed the fecundating grains to the receptive stigma, which they could not otherwise reach. Such was Sprengel's belief, which he endeavored to substantiate in an exhaustive volume containing the result of his observations pursuant to this theory.
But Sprengel had divined but half the truth. The insect was necessary, it was true, but the Sprengel idea was concerned only with the individual flower, and the great botanist was soon perplexed and confounded by an opposing array of facts which completely destroyed the authority of his work—facts which showed conclusively that the insect could not thus convey the pollen as described, because the stigma in the flower was either not yet ready to receive it—perhaps tightly closed against it—or was past its receptive period, even decidedly withered.
