68o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ent to his purposes has become what it is in obedience to an inherent 

 tendency to exchange its original condition for a better one. And it 

 is by taking advantage of this tendency and creating such better con- 

 ditions that man has drawn it into his service. 



This willingness and often eagerness in plants to change their 

 habitat, sometimes without the least acclimation, enlarges, therefore, 

 from the mere lusus naturae, which it at first appeared to be, into a 

 law which is coextensive with plant-life. In view of the facts adduced, 

 and others which will occur to the reader, we may conclude that the 

 law of adaptation as popularly held requires extensive qualification if 

 allowed to stand at all; that it is rather apparent than real; that 

 large classes of facts are marshaled against it, and that some wider 

 law is perpetually overruling it. The adaptations of Nature of which 

 we hear so much are not perfect. Nature does not provide each spe- 

 cies with a habitat best suited to its fullest development. But every 

 plant is at all times ready to change its habitat for a better one, and 

 this is actually going on whenever occasion permits. 



Let us now inquire whether the facts enumerated admit of any 

 general explanation. Mr. Meehan proposes to account for the better 

 growth of swamp-trees in drier soil by maintaining that their seeds 

 cannot germinate in dry ground. If this be true, it is a worse com- 

 mentary on the theory of adaptation than I am willing myself to 

 make without further proof. Certainly no intelligent adapting power 

 could originate so gross and apparently gratuitous an inadaptation as 

 an organism doomed to live out its existence under conditions un- 

 favorable to its healthy development, because, forsooth, it could begin 

 its career only under such conditions ! But, as both the theory and 

 the commentary rest on a teleological basis, they are both worthless 

 from a scientific point of view. 



But, however this may apply to the trees enumerated by him, it 

 certainly does not apply to many plants of the same class* which I 

 have named, for florists propagate them from the seed when they 

 choose. Still less can this explanation be admitted to account for any 

 of the other classes from which illustrations have been drawn. And, 

 indeed, I am not aware that any attempt has ever been made to bring 

 forward a rational explanation of a general character for the facts 

 under consideration. Botanists, generally, seem to have been either 

 too much dazed by the light of those more universal and striking 

 features to which attention was called at the outset, or too intent on 

 the special study of the facts themselves, independent of the lessons 

 they inculcate, to have worked out a solution for the problem I have 

 been seeking to present. But the chief obstacle, after all, to such a 

 solution, is to be found in the satisfaction which every one seems to 

 feel with the old explanation, viz., that plants grow in particular 

 places because they are adapted to them and to no other, which, as 

 we have seen, is opposed by a strong array of facts. 



