Read "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard" by Anatole France online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
August 21, 1869.
Page eighty-seven. Only twenty lines more and I shall have finished my book about insects and flowers. Page eighty-seventh and last. "As we have already seen, the visits of insects are of the utmost importance to plants; since their duty is to carry to the pistils the pollen of the stamens. It seems also that the flower itself is arranged and made attractive for the purpose of inviting this nuptial visit. I think I have been able to show that the nectary of the plant distils a sugary liquid which attracts the insects and obliges it to aid unconsciously in the work of direct or cross fertilisation. The last method of fertilisation is the more common. I have shown that flowers are coloured and perfumed so as to attract insects, and interiorly so constructed as to offer those visitors such a mode of access that they cannot penetrate into the corolla without depositing upon the stigma the pollen with which they have been covered.