WILD FLOWERS.
An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors

By Neltje Blanchan




PREFACE

Surely a foreword of explanation is called for from one who has
the temerity to offer a surfeited public still another book on
wild flowers. Inasmuch as science has proved that almost every
blossom in the world is everything it is because of its necessity
to attract insect friends or to repel its foes - its form,
mechanism, color, markings, odor, time of opening and closing,
and its season of blooming being the result of natural selection
by that special insect upon which each depends more or less
absolutely for help in perpetuating its species - it seems fully
time that the vitally important and interesting relationship
existing between our common wild flowers and their winged
benefactors should be presented in a popular book.

Is it enough to know merely the name of the flower you meet in
the meadow? The blossom has an inner meaning, hopes and fears
that inspire its brief existence, a scheme of salvation for its
species in the struggle for survival that it has been slowly
perfecting with some insect's help through the ages. It is not a
passive thing to be admired by human eyes, nor does it waste its
sweetness on the desert air. It is a sentient being, impelled to