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The Snap-Dragon

Antirrhinum majus- WHY should this gay flower be called a snap-dragon? To snap, in vulgar parlance, is to bite suddenly, or to utter biting words in a snappish or sudden and ungentle manner, as in a characteristic passage in Cowper's "Task"-- "Is Winter hideous in a garb like this? Needs he the tragic fur, the smoke of lamps, The pent-up breath of an unsav'ry throng, To thaw him into feeling; or the smart And snappish dialogue that flippant wits Call comedy, to prompt him with a smile?"

Although the dragon the flower is supposed to represent in the act of snapping is a creature of the imagination, it is more or less reptilian, and the gaping mouth and huge under jaws of a lizard or crocodile are very fairly suggested in the conformation of the flower. The botanical name Antirrhinum refers to the snout-like figure of the flower, and so we are doubly compelled to take notice of its place in the long catalogue of "mimetic" plants, which are not is when the seed is newly ripe in autumn, to afford the plants a long season of growth before the sunshine persuades them to flower. Mr. Darwin, in his interesting work on "Cross and Self-fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom," gives some interesting particulars of the ingenious way in which bumble-bees obtain the honey from the snap-dragon when they cannot push past the projecting lip: "In Antirrhinum majus one or two holes had been made on the lower side, close to the little protuberance which represents the nectary, and therefore directly in front of and close to the spot where the nectar is secreted." In experiments, Mr. Darwin found that while fifty seed-pods protected by a net gave nearly ten grains of seed, a similar number of pods from plants that the bumble-bees had free access to yielded over twenty-three grains of seed. It is not, however, by piercing holes in the flower that the bees effect fertilisation, but by thrusting their way through the jaws of the dragon into the throat, where they encounter the stamens, and becoming dusted with pollen, leave some of it on the stigma of that or the next flower they enter in like manner.