126 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 
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-fertiliza- 
tion, though on a superficial view it strikes one as a disad- 
vantage, 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 Prodoxide. 
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 pro- 
duced 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 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 ; but no one can watch her opera- 
tions without feeling that there is in all of them as much 
of purpose as there is in those of the female Pelopeus 
who so assiduously collects, paralyzes and stores away in 
her mud-dabs the spiders which are to nourish her young ; 
or in the many other curious provisions which insects make 
for their progeny, which, in the majority of instances, they 
are destined never to behold. Nor can I see any good 
* Irefer here to the filamentose Yuccas. Where they are more dis- 
tinctly glutinous, as in Y. whipplei, the statement is, perhaps, less true. 
