But most of us hold a mistaken idea about the relation of the individual to the whole. We are apt to theorize that it is the duty of the individual to keep the whole in order, and a good many of us are fully convinced that the world owes us a living. So it does, and it behooves each one of us to be faithful in discharging his individual share of the aggregate debtNature has a whole page about that in her wonderful volume
Take, for instance, this clover. What we call the blossom is, in reality, many blossomsLook at the mass under a glass. You will see that the clover head is made up of numerous minute cups in a compact cluster. Each cup is a perfect blossom. As we now see it in the clover it is a tiny tube, but it once possessed five slender petals which are now unitedThe little pointed scollops that rim the cup suggest these petals. Now, the tiny cup is descended from a five-petaled ancestor, growing upon its individual stem and depending upon insects for its fertilization. The flower was small, however, and many of them must have been overlooked by the insects
But those blossoms that, growing very closetogether, formed little clusters, were more conspicuous than the solitary ones, and were discovered, visited for their honey and incidentally fertilized by the winged freebooters. These blossoms bore fruit and their descendants inherited the social instinct prompting them to draw together that each might give the other its help and co-operation in attracting the insects. So, by degrees, the co-operative habit became fixed in the clover, and in many other plants, until the compositæ became a botanical fact. In other words, the individuals formed a body social of their own, growing from a compact cluster from a common stem, each giving and receiving, constantly, its use and share in the common life. The many-petaled flowers found it inconvenient to arrange themselves in the composite order, and so, as we see in the clover, the petals have pressed closely together and united to form a tube-shaped flower, and as the tubular form is best adapted to receive fertilization by the bee, which insect is the most useful to the clover blossom, that form has been perpetuated in this plant.