30 Mr. A. R. Wallace on the Habits of the Orang-Utan: 



itself; but when it is, it uses, not these powerful teeth, but its 

 arms and legs to defend itself. And, lastly, the female, which 

 is weaker, which is encumbered by its young, and which would 

 therefore afford a much easier prey, and a more tempting object 

 of attack, is quite unprovided with these supposed means of 

 defence. Do you mean to assert, then, some of my readers will 

 indignantly ask, that this animal, or any animal, is provided with 

 organs which are of no use to it ? Yes, we reply, we do mean 

 to assert that many animals are provided with organs and ap- 

 pendages which serve no material or physical purpose. The 

 extraordinary excrescences of many insects, the fantastic and 

 many-coloured plumes which adorn certain birds, the excessively 

 developed horns in some of the antelopes, the colours and in- 

 finitely modified forms of many flower-petals, are all cases, for 

 an explanation of which we must look to some general principle 

 far more recondite than a simple relation to the necessities of 

 the individual. We conceive it to be a most erroneous, a most 

 contracted view of the organic world, to believe that every part 

 of an animal or of a plant exists solely for some material and 

 physical use to the individual, — to believe that all the beauty, all 

 the infinite combinations and changes of form and structure 

 should have the sole purpose and end of enabling each animal 

 to support its existence, — to believe, in fact, that we know the 

 one sole end and purpose of every modification that exists in 

 organic beings, and to refuse to recognize the possibility of there 

 being any other. Naturalists are too apt to imaginej when they 

 cannot discover, a use for everything in nature : they are not 

 even content to let " beauty " be a sufficient use, but hunt after 

 some purpose to which even that can be applied by the animal 

 itself, as if one of the noblest and most refining parts of man^s 

 nature, the love of beauty for its own sake, would not be per- 

 ceptible also in the works of a Supreme Creator*. 



* The talented author of the * Plurahty of Worlds ' has some admirable 

 remarks on this subject. He says, " In the structure of animals, especially 

 that large class best known to us, vertebrate animals, there is a general 

 plan, which, so far as we can see, goes beyond the circuit of the special 

 adaptation of each animal to its mode of living ; and is a rule of creative 

 action, in addition to the rule that the parts shall be subservient to an 

 intelligible purpose of animal life. We have noticed several phaenomena 

 in the animal kingdom, where parts and features appear rudimentary and 

 inert, discharging no office in their oeconomy, and speaking to us not of 

 purpose, but of law." Again : " And do we not, in innumerable cases, see 

 beauties of colour and form, texture and lustre, which suggest to us irre- 

 sistibly the belief that beauty and regular form are rules of the creative 

 agency, even when they seem to us, looking at the creation for uses only, 

 idle and wanton expenditure of beauty and regularity ? To what purpose 

 are the host of splendid circles which decorate the tail of the peacock, more 

 beautiful, each of them, than Saturn and his rings ? To what purpose the 



