This section is from the book "The Gardener's Monthly And Horticulturist V28", by Thomas Meehan. See also: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long.
Those who have written of this curious subject, the agency of insects in the cross-fertilization of flowers, love to -tell of the mutual interests involved. The insects want honey - flowers want foreign pollen - so the plant receives the bee as a welcome foreign trader. It receives the needed pollen, and gladdens the heart of the busy little merchant, who departs laden with the treasures for which the flower had no use of its own. But in the little world of plants and flowers, as in the wider intercourse among human beings, mutual interest is not always the basis of change. There are wretched instances of ignoble selfishness that set all moral law at defiance - plants that are worse than cannibals, for they not only actually kill and eat the little traders that venture within their domains, but have not the higher motives outside of mere love of a delicacy, which See-mann tells us the Fiji Islanders have, when tempted to dine on their celebrated dish of roast missionary. Among the many instances illustrative of this barbaric trait in plants, that have appeared in print, a very interesting one has recently been contributed by an English observer, Mr. A. D. Webster. It relates to Arum crinitum, an old and well-known Corsican plant, though in modern times it has been given the dreadful name of He-licodiceros muscivorus, the last, of course, in reference to its fly-devouring propensity.
It is closely allied to the well-known Indian turnip, of our woods, but has a foetid odor similar to the skunk-cabbage, to which it also has relationship. Mr. Webster says the carrion-like scent is very attractive to a large number of flies, which enter the spathe, but never return. After being open for two days, he has found as many as seventy two captives, without counting the smaller creatures. With a pre-disposition to believe that the insects were destined to act as agents in fertilization, he was amazed to find that the pollen was not in a condition for use, till after the captured insects were dead. These he found, lived long enough to deposit eggs, which, by the time the pollen matured had become little "wigglers," which, crawling about the spadix, carried the pollen from male to the female flowers. It is not yet quite clear, whether the flower acts from pure vicious-ness in this murderous course - in charity, we may suppose the selfishness already hinted at, and believe that in some way the nitrogenous material of the insects is used as food, as in the case of pitcher plants and Venus' fly-traps. Mr. W. charitably looks on the "wigglers" as fertilizing agents, and that the parents were captured that this good might come.
But as this is not cross-fertilization, and the stamens in these aroids being usually above the pistils, so that the pollen when discharged would naturally fall on the stigmas below them, there would really seem no excuse for this murderous waste of life by an innocent-looking flower. - Independent.
 
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