Bismarck weekly tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, Dakota [N.D.]) 1884-1943, 1890-09-12
WATER LILIES.

Pink Ones Are Most Likely to Survive,
According to the Evolution Hypothesis.
The American water lily has become
sweet scented in something like the fashion
I am going to describe. When the rose
chafers and water side insects fit from one
lily to another, in search of the honey
secreted by the petals, they carry pollen
the yellow dust you know so we'll in the
center of many fowers-from one blossom
to the next they visit. Now, this pollen is
necessary in order to make the seeds swell
and so to keep up the supply of water lilies
from one generation to another. The best
seeds are produced when the flowers are
crossed-that is to say, when pollen from
one blossom is busted over the tiny unripe
fruits of another.
The beetles and other insects don't know,
of course, that they are performing this
valuable service for the plant; they only
60, hungry creatures that they are, to get
honey Tor the satisfaction of their w
greedy appetites; but as they rummage
about among the pretty flowers they dust
themselves over unconsciously with the
pollen, and then they fly away and rub it
off on the center of the very next lily they
chance to light upon.
Well, l need hardly tell you, then, that
lilies which succeed in attracting the great
est number of insects to themselves will
also set the greatest number of seeds, and
so will be likely in tn. long run to outlive
their less attractive fellows in their chill
dren's children. So if any lily happens to
possess any faint perfume, however slight,
which helps to draw upon it the notice Of
the beetles, it will be pretty sure to secure
a greater number of these unconscious al
lies, and therefore to succeed better, one
time with another, in setting it's seed thar
the scentlcss lilies.
In some such way, ! take it, the 90 ahead
blossoms of your American ponds began
to develop a faint perfume, and as, when
once the ball was fairly set rolling, those
lilies in each generation would be most
likely to succeed which possessed the most
delicious perfume, the end of it all is that
your American kind are now all exquisite
ly scented, while our stick-in-the-mud old
European type has stuck to the original
ancestral pattern and has got no perfume
at all Of any sort.
Something Of the same kind, no doubt,
also accounts for the prevalent pinkiness
of the American water lily; only here the
selective action of the insects has gone but
a very little way, and in some of your ponds
the lilies are still every bit as pale and
white as ours are. But in some other ponds
the lilies are quite distinctly pinkish, and
at Barnstable, Mass, they are rosy red,
and sometimes even almost crimson. Here
| Suppos we catch the insects actually at
work; their preference for the pretty pink
flowers over the pale white ones has only
just begun to affect the color in some
places, but not in all.
AS time goes on I have very little doubt
the beetles will more and more prefer the
pink, until at last the white are left en-
tirely unvisited, and, never setting their
seed, must in the end die out altogether.
If I should visit America again in another
couple of thousand years or so l shall con-
tidently expect to find all the big water
lilies pink or red, and never a white one
left anywhere. There are indeed some
kinds in other parts of the world which
have already passed through this stage of
evolution, and are now rose color, blue or
scarlet.-Grant Allen in Wide Awake.