Page:Darwin - The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilized by insects (1877).djvu/306

286 degree but in many ways, with the preservation of those variations which were beneficial to the organism under complex and ever-varying conditions of life, transcend in an incomparable manner the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could invent.

The use of each trifling detail of structure is far from a barren search to those who believe in natural selection. When a naturalist casually takes up the study of an organic being, and does not investigate its whole life (imperfect though that study will ever be), he naturally doubts whether each trifling point can be of any use, or indeed whether it be due to any general law. Some naturalists believe that numberless structures have been created for the sake of mere variety and beauty,—much as a workman would make different patterns. I, for one, have often and often doubted whether this or that detail of structure in many of the Orchideæ and other plants could be of any service; yet, if of no good, these structures could not have been modelled by the natural preservation of useful variations; such details can only be vaguely accounted for by the direct action of the conditions of life, or the mysterious laws of correlated growth.

To give nearly all the instances of trifling details of structure in the flowers of Orchids, which are certainly of high importance, would be to recapitulate almost the whole of this volume. But I will recall to the reader's memory a few cases. I do not here refer to the fundamental framework of the plant, such as the remnants of the fifteen primary organs arranged alternately in the five whorls; for almost everyone who believes in the gradual evolution of species will admit that their presence is due to inheritance from a remote parent-form. Innumerable facts with respect to the