raff, whereas, in the brilliant class of composites,
including the asters, sunflowers, daisies, dandelions, and thistles,
nearly seventy-five per cent. of the visitors were steady, industrious
bees. Certain dingy blossoms which lay themselves out to attract wasps,
are obviously adapted, as Mueller quaintly remarks, "to a less
aesthetically cultivated circle of visitors." But the most brilliant
among all insect-fertilized flowers are those which specially affect the
society of butterflies; and they are only surpassed in this respect
throughout all nature by the still larger and more magnificent tropical
species which owe their fertilization to humming-birds and
brush-tongued lories.

Is it not a curious, yet a comprehensible circumstance, that the tastes
which thus show themselves in the development, by natural selection, of
lovely flowers, should also show themselves in the marked preference for
beautiful mates? Poised on yonder sprig of harebell stands a little
purple-winged butterfly, one of the most exquisite among our British
kinds. That little butterfly owes its own rich and delicately shaded
tints to the long selective action of a million generations among its
ancestors. So we find throughout that the most beautifully colored birds
and insects are always those which have had most to do with the
production of bright-colored fruits and flowers. The butterflies and
rose-beetles are the most gorgeous among insects; the humming-birds and
parrots are the most gorgeous among birds. Nay, more, exactly like
effects have been produced in two hemispheres on different tribes by the
same causes. The plain brown swifts of the North have developed among
tropical West Indian and South American orchids the metallic gorgets and
crimson crests of the humming-bird; while a totally unlike group of
Asiatic birds have developed among the rich flora of India and the Malay
Archipelago the exactly similar plumage of the exquisite sun-birds. Just
as bees depend upon flowers, and flowers upon bees, so the color-sense
of animals has created the bright petals of blossoms; and the bright
petals have reacted upon the tastes of the animals themselves, and
through their tastes upon their own appearance.

THE HERON'S HAUNT

From 'Vignettes from Nature'

Most of the fields on the country-side are now laid up for hay, or down
in the tall haulming corn; and so I am driven from my accustomed
botanizing grounds on the open, and compelled to take r