Morning journal and courier., 1885-10-06
BIRDS AND FLOWERS.
How the Birds Give Color and P
 fume 10 Tropical Flowers.

How the Birds Give Color and Per-
 fume to Tropical Flowers.
 From the Pall Mall Gazette.]
 Running birds are not by origin honey suckers. They are in the main insect eaters and spider hunters, and they dive among the flowers, not in search of the nectar itself, but of the small flies and other miscellane- ous insect riffraff that the honey attracts into the deep-throated neotaries. At least, this was their early aboriginal habit, for the humming bird is by descent 8 tropical swift, modified form of the dingy, black coated, swallow-like creatures that hawk open mouthad for moths and flies around our own church steeples on calm August even ings; and young humming birds, in the cal low nestling stage, refuse to this day the of. fered allurements of sugary syrup, and in= sist inhexibly upon their hereditary fare Of plump insects and well fattened spiders
 They remain still at the swift level of hum ming bird development. But the adult birds, accustomed always to find their food in full
 blown blossoms, intermixed with nectar, have come at last to regard the honey as part of their proper means of suEsistence, and to demand it as regularly as civilized humanity
 demands its beer with it's bread and beef.
 At first, DO doubt, the primitive humnlipg bird only went to look in flowers for insects,
 because he knew he was sure of finding them there; but now, grown accustomed to take his sweets and meat together, like ourrant
 jelly with hare, he is no longer satisfied with purely carnivorous or insectivorous diet,
 but requires to have it properly sweetened
 Practically, however, all these hower-heunt
 ing birds have now acquired the precise hab= its of bees or butterflies, and there are many
 hurn,ning birds which it is almost, if not jpop tr.I iSfip II, from certain species of humming- bird hawk
 moth. The natives in some parts of South
 America have theory, indeed, that the
 moth is only, ss t Yafe, the 1arva of the bird, and that as it grows older it gradually acquires bones and heak, just as human in fant progresses slowly from the soft and
 pulpy condition of babyhood to the angular ostensity of maturer years.
 While the birds have thus adapted them selves to the flowers, by acquiring long, and darting barhed tongues, the flowers for their part have is usual repaid the compliment by adapting themselves in return to the habits of the birds, and acquiring correspondingly deep corollas. It is the great object in life of every intelligent and well-regulated plant species to specialize itself for securing the visits of some one particular insect or bird visitor, because by so doing it economies the useless pilfering of it's honey by stray winged thieves, and gets it's embryo seeds PtSPSAAy hSt " o SiooCuAO PoSutiotiy adapted to perform that friendly office for it. self alone. No sooner did humming birds and lories begin to devote themselves exclu- sively to flowers than the flowers began to devote themselves exclusively to the hum ming birds and lories. They heightened their tubes out of all proportion to the tongues of nectar-sucking insects, so that only the favored birds themselves could oh- tain access to the coveted honey witA iss ac companying swarm of flies aid heetles At t.ae sane tine they bent their stsc.inens and piatils into such for.ss that they came into contact with the birds bill, and enabled it ta transfer the pollen of one flower to the sensi- tive surface of ths next visited, thereby in- pFegnating the seeds in the ovary.
 Of course, birds being so much larger than bees, the flowers specially affected by them,
 such as the huge tubular Brugmannsias of our gardens, have to be much bigger and handsomer than those which merely lay themselves oqt to attract the notice of minor