Note 13 — ON THE UTILITY TO FLOWERS OF THEIR BEAUTY.

A much more brilliantly coloured member of the same family is the Dicentra (Diclytra) spectabilis, so familiar in our gardens. Any one who examines the flowers of this species will continually find the pollen grains transferred to the stigma without the slightest trace of the flower ever having opened so as to allow of insect agency. Dr. Lindley13 has given an account of the mechanism for self-fertilization; and this flower has recently been the subject of an elaborate study by the German botanist, Hildebrand,14 and he concurs in the view that the anthers inevitably communicate their pollen to the pistil, and that as the result of a very complicated and subtle arrangement of the parts, which it would be useless to attempt to describe without diagrams. But he believes that in addition to the arrangements for self-fertilization, another arrangement exists for producing cross-fertilization by insects; but as the plant has never produced seed under his observation, he is unable to tell whether one mode of fertilization is more useful than the other. I think the evidence of the self-fertilization is far clearer than that of the cross-fertilization.