Wherever I went in the wood, the soft droning song of the bees went with me. You could hardly put one foot before the other without dashing the cup from the lip of one of these winged wanderers. But though the anemones and primroses grew so thick, so inextricably mingled together, the honey-bees kept to the one species of flower. They clambered in and out of the star-like anemones, sometimes two and three at a blossom together. But the primroses were always passed over, by hive-bee and humble-bee alike. Here and there, I picked one of the sulphur blossoms, and tearing it apart, made sure that there was nectar in plenty—its presence was plain even to human eye. The truth was, of course, that the sweets of the primrose were placed so far down the trumpet-tube of the flower, that no bee had tongue long enough to gather them, even if they were to her mind.
Yet though the bees might scorn the primrose for much the same reason as the fox contemned the grapes in the fable, there was one creature specially told off by Nature to do the necessary work of fertilisation. Now and again in the general low murmur of voices about me, I could distinguish an alien note. This came from a large fly, in a light-brown fluffy jacket, with transparent wings fantastically scalloped in black. He jerked himself to and fro in the air from one primrose to another, hovering a moment over each before settling and thrusting a tongue of amazing length down the yellow throttle of the flower. His name I have never heard, but I know that, until recent times, he continued to conceal, not only his means of livelihood, but his very existence from the vigilance of naturalists: Darwin himself failed to identify this primrose-sprite with his special mission in fertilising work.
It is strange how familiarity with the commonest natural objects may exist side by side with a pitiful ignorance about them. I had gathered primroses every spring for half a lifetime through before I realised that I bore, not one, but two kinds of blossom in my hand. The discovery, I remember, came with something like a shock of surprise. Yet there was no blinking the fact: the wonder, indeed, was that in all the thousands I had gathered, as boy and youth and man, the thing had never before occurred to me. There was no difference in the sulphur-hued faces of the flowers. But while the deep, central tube of some was closed with a little whorl of pale buff feathers, in others this tube was open, and there stood just within it a slender stem topped with a small green globe—it seemed at first sight, then, that the sexual principle in the primrose was divided, each plant bearing only male, or only female flowers. But investigating farther, I found that this was not so. Each flower was truly hermaphrodite, only in one the male feathery anthers were uppermost, and in the other the green pistil of the female appeared above.