raw beefsteak of uncertain age. These little creatures, seen in every
butcher shop throughout the summer, the flower furnishes with a free
lunch of pollen in consideration of the transportation of a few grains
to another blossom. Absence of the usual floral attractions gives the
carrion flies a practical monopoly of the pollen food, which no doubt
tastes as it smells.

The Sessile-flowered Wake-Robin (_T. sessile_), whose dark purple,
purplish-red, or greenish blossom, narrower of sepal and petals than the
preceding, is seated in a whorl of three egg-shaped, sometimes blotched,
leaves, possesses a rather pleasant odor; nevertheless, it seems to have
no great attraction for insects. The stigmas, which are very large,
almost touch the anthers surrounding them; therefore the beetles which
one frequently sees crawling over them to feed on the pollen so jar
them, no doubt, as to self-fertilize the flower; but it is scarcely
probable these slow crawlers often transfer the grains from one blossom
to another. A degraded flower like this has little need of color and
perfume, one would suppose; yet it may be even now slowly perfecting its
way toward an ideal of which we see a part only complete. In deep, rich,
moist woods and thickets the sessile trillium blooms in April or May,
from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Minnesota southward nearly to the Gulf.


Carrion-flower

_Smilax herbacea_

_Flowers_--Carrion-scented, yellowish-green, 15 to 80 small, 6-parted
ones clustered in an umbel on a long peduncle. _Stem:_ Smooth, unarmed,
climbing with the help of tendril-like appendages from the base of