Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/353

 re-developed, but not unfrequently in a different form and for a distinct purpose.

The chief types of flowering plants have existed during the millions of ages of the whole tertiary period, and during this enormous lapse of time many of them may have been modified in the direction of insect fertilisation, and again into that of self-fertilisation, not once or twice only, but perhaps scores or even hundreds of times; and at each such modification a difference in the environment may have led to a distinct line of development. At one epoch the highest specialisation of structure in adaptation to a single species or group of insects may have saved a plant from extinction; while, at other times, the simplest mode of self-fertilisation, combined with greater powers of dispersal and a constitution capable of supporting diverse physical conditions, may have led to a similar result. With some groups the tendency seems to have been almost continuously to greater and greater specialisation, while with others a tendency to simplification and degradation has resulted in such plants as the grasses and sedges.

We are now enabled dimly to perceive how the curious anomaly of very simple and very complex methods of securing cross-fertilisation—both equally effective—may have been brought about. The simple modes may be the result of a comparatively direct modification from the more primitive types of flowers, which were occasionally, and, as it were, accidentally visited and fertilised by insects; while the more complex modes, existing for the most part in the highly irregular flowers, may result from those cases in which adaptation to insect-fertilisation, and partial or complete degradation to self-fertilisation or to wind-fertilisation, have again and again recurred, each time producing some additional complexity, arising from the working up of old rudiments for new purposes, till there have been reached the marvellous flower structures of the papilionaceous tribes, of the asclepiads, or of the orchids.

We thus see that the existing diversity of colour and of structure in flowers is probably the ultimate result of the ever-recurring struggle for existence, combined with the ever-changing relations between the vegetable and animal kingdoms during countless ages. The constant variability of every part