Botany and entomology must henceforth go hand-in-hand. The flower must be considered as an embodied welcome to an insect affinity, and all sorts of courtesies prevail among them in the reception of their invited guests. The banquet awaits, but various singular ceremonies are enjoined between the cup and the lip, the stamens doing the hospitalities in time-honored forms of etiquette. Flora exacts no arbitrary customs. Each flower is a law unto itself. And how expressive, novel, and eccentric are these social customs! The garden salvia, for instance, slaps the burly bumblebee upon the back and marks him for her own as he is ushered in to the feast. The mountain-laurel welcomes the twilight moth with an impulsive multiple embrace. The desmodium and genesta celebrate their hospitality with a joke, as it were, letting their threshold fall beneath the feet of the caller, and startling him with an explosion and a cloud of yellow powder, suggesting the day pyrotechnics of the Chinese. The prickly-pear cactus encloses its buzzing visitor in a golden bower, from which he must emerge at the roof as dusty as a miller. The barberry, in similar vein, lays mischievous hold of the tongue of its sipping bee, and I fancy, in his early acquaintance, before he has learned its ways, gives him more of a welcome than he had bargained for. The evening primrose, with outstretched filaments, hangs a golden necklace about the welcome murmuring noctuid, while the various orchids excel in the ingenuity of their salutations. Here is one which presents a pair of tiny clubs to the sphinx-moth at its threshold, gluing them to its bulging eyes. Another attaches similar tokens to the tongues of butterflies, while the cypripedium speeds its parting guest with a sticking-plaster smeared all over its back. And so we might continue almost indefinitely. From the stand-point of frivolous human etiquette we smile, perhaps, at customs apparently so whimsical and unusual, forgetting that such a smile may partake somewhat of irreverence. For what are they all but the divinely imposed conditions of interassociation? say, rather, interdependence, between the flower and the insect, which is its ordained companion, its faithful messenger, often its sole sponsor-the meadows murmuring with an intricate and eloquent system of intercommunings beside which the most inextricable tangle of metropolitan electrical currents is not a circumstance. What a storied fabric were this murmurous tangle woven day by day, could each one of these insect messengers, like the spider, leave its visible trail behind it!
As a rule, these blossom ceremonies are of the briefest description. Occasionally, however, as in the cypripedium and in certain of the arums, or "jack-in-the-pulpit," and aristolochias, the welcome becomes somewhat aggressive, the guest being forcibly detained awhile after tea, or, as in the case of our milkweed, occasionally entrapped for life.
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