. Notes on the life history of British flowering plants. Botany; Plant ecology. 12 BRITISH FLOWERING PLANTS their scent at particular hours ; thus, Hesperis matron- alis and Lychnis vespertina smell in the evening, and Hahenaria hifolia is particularly sweet at night. Besides the means of attracting welcome guests, many plants have adopted various devices for barring access to their stores of honey of insects whose visits would be of no use in transferring pollen. For instance, in the case of bee flowers, small flying insects are kept from the nectar by barriers of stifli'hairs which they are
. Notes on the life history of British flowering plants. Botany; Plant ecology. 12 BRITISH FLOWERING PLANTS their scent at particular hours ; thus, Hesperis matron- alis and Lychnis vespertina smell in the evening, and Hahenaria hifolia is particularly sweet at night. Besides the means of attracting welcome guests, many plants have adopted various devices for barring access to their stores of honey of insects whose visits would be of no use in transferring pollen. For instance, in the case of bee flowers, small flying insects are kept from the nectar by barriers of stifli'hairs which they are not strong enough to pass— Tro- pseolum. Creeping insects, as ants, are frequently kept back by sticky hairs on the stem or flower-stalk —as in many Saxifrages. A large proportion of dicotyledonous flowers have five sepals and five petals. Why is this ? It is probably to be ex- plained by the phyllo- taxy, or arrangement of the leaves on the stalk. The petals, as Goethe seems first to have sug- gested, are modified leaves. Now if we ex- amine a Rose shoot (Fig. 4) we shall find that the leaves are arranged in a spiral round the stem in such a manner that with whatever leaf we start the sixth comes directly over it, the seventh over the second, and so on. In fact, the leaves form whorls of five, one over the other. This is still more evident in those species which have a five-. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original Lubbock, John, Sir, 1834-1913. London, New York, Macmillan and Co. , Ltd.
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