Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/693

Rh the qualities which secured its maintenance, but transmitting them in different degrees. The struggle for food again supervenes, and those to whom the favorable quality has been transmitted in excess will assuredly triumph. It is easy to see that we have here the addition of increments favorable to the individual still more rigorously carried out than in the case of domestication; for not only are unfavorable specimens not selected by Nature, but they are destroyed. This is what Mr. Darwin calls "Natural Selection," which "acts by the preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being." With this idea he interpenetrates and leavens the vast store of facts that he and others have collected. We cannot, without shutting our eyes through fear or prejudice, fail to see that Darwin is here dealing, not with imaginary, but with true causes; nor can we fail to discern what vast modifications may be produced by natural selection in periods sufficiently long. Each individual increment may resemble what mathematicians call a "differential" (a quantity indefinitely small); but definite and great changes may obviously be produced by the integration of these infinitesimal quantities through practically infinite time.

If Darwin, like Bruno, rejects the notion of creative power acting after human fashion, it certainly is not because he is unacquainted with the numberless exquisite adaptations on which this notion of a supernatural artificer has been founded. His book is a repository of the most startling facts of this description. Take the marvelous observation which he cites from Dr. Crüger, where a bucket with an aperture, serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid. Bees visit the flower: in eager search of material for their combs they push each other into the bucket, the drenched ones escaping from their involuntary bath by the spout. Here they rub their backs against the viscid stigma of the flower and obtain glue; then against the pollen-masses, which are thus stuck to the back of the bee and carried away. "When the bee, thus provided, flies to another flower, or to the same flower a second time, and is pushed by his comrades into the bucket, and then crawls out by the passage, the pollen-mass upon its back necessarily comes first into contact with the viscid stigma," which takes up the pollen; and this is how that orchid is fertilized. Or take this other case of the Catasetum. "Bees visit these flowers in order to gnaw the labellum; on doing this they inevitably touch a long, tapering, sensitive projection. This, when touched, transmits a sensation or vibration to a certain membrane, which is instantly ruptured, setting free a spring, by which the pollen-mass is shot forth like an arrow in the right direction, and adheres by its viscid extremity to the back of the bee." In this way the fertilizing pollen is spread abroad.

It is the mind thus stored with the choicest materials of the teleologist that rejects teleology, seeking to refer these wonders to natural causes. They illustrate, according to him, the method of Nature, not