Note 3 — ON THE UTILITY TO FLOWERS OF THEIR BEAUTY.

"Flowers," says Mr. Darwin,3 "rank amongst the most beautiful productions of Nature, and they have become, through natural selection, beautiful, or rather conspicuous in contrast with the greenness of the leaves, that they might be easily observed and visited by insects, so that their fertilization might be favoured. I have come to this conclusion, from finding it an invariable rule that when a flower is fertilized by the wind it never has a gaily-coloured corolla. Again, several plants habitually produce two kinds of flowers: one kind open and coloured, so as to attract insects; the other closed and not coloured, destitute of nectar, and never visited by insects. We may safely conclude that, if insects had never existed on the face of the earth, the vegetation would not have been decked with beautiful flowers, but would have produced only such poor flowers as are now borne by our firs, oaks, nut and ash trees, by the grasses, by spinach, docks, and nettles."