Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/193

Rh those individuals of the larger, fleshy-fruited species like aloifolia which happen to bloom about the same time of the year.

Thus we find that some species of Pronuba is connected with all the yuccas so far studied in this connection, and I have no doubt that this will be found to be generally true, so far as the indigenous species are concerned, and that in the native home of any of the species we shall find that pollination depends upon some species of Pronuba. This is rendered certain by the fact that, wherever I have been able to examine the mature or partially mature fruit of other yuccas in herbaria, I have in almost every instance observed the constriction and in most instances seen traces of the puncture and the work of the larva.

We have, in the structures and functions which are so characteristic of this yucca moth, admirable adaptations of means to an end, whether for pollinizing the plant or providing for a future generation. The Pronuba larva rarely destroys more than a dozen of the seeds, so that several may develop within a single pod and yet leave many perfect seeds, while, for the reasons already stated, we occasionally have pods without a trace of the insect.

There is between Pronuba and its food-plant a mutual interdependence which excites our wonder, and is fraught with interesting suggestions to those who are in the habit of reasoning from effect to cause. Whether we believe, as I certainly do, that this perfect adaptation and adjustment have been brought about by slow degrees through the long course of ages, or whether we believe that they were always so from the beginning, they are equally suggestive. The peculiar structure of the flower which prevents self-fertilization, though on a superficial view it strike one as a disadvantage, is, in reality, of benefit, as the value of cross-fertilization has been fully established; while the maxillary tentacles of the female moth are very plainly an advantage to her species in the "struggle for life"; and it is quite easy to conceive, on Darwinian grounds, how both these characteristics have been produced in the course of time from archetypal forms which possessed neither, and in reality we get a good insight into the process in studying the characteristics of other species of the family Prodoxidæ. These peculiarities are, moreover, mutually and reciprocally beneficial, so that the plant and the animal are each influenced and modified by the other, and the same laws which produced the beneficial specialization of parts will maintain them by the elimination of all tendencies to depart from them.

The pollen grains would not adhere by chance to the rolled-up tentacles, and we have seen how full of apparent purpose and deliberation Pronuba's actions are, It may be that all her actions are the result merely of "blind instinct," by which term proud man has been wont to designate the doings of inferior animals;