326 The Living Plant 



never the expression of adaptation to some single function alone, 

 but represent a resultant or compromise between adaptation to 

 some leading function and adaptation to a number of minor ones, 

 — the whole being further modified by the influence of a quantity 



of other factors, — ^mechanical, incidental and 

 hereditary. 



In this discussion of cross pollination and the 

 flower, which involves some of the most com- 

 plicated and efficient of all known adapta- 

 tions, the reader must have noticed how closely 

 the mode of presentation of ideas, and even the 

 the Lrnnffa, or Twin- language that is used, corrcspoud with those 

 adheiVe ''gknds ^on wMch are commonly employed in describing 

 the base of the flower, gQjjie great product of hiuiian activity, — the 



supposed to protect . . 



it from access of Organization of society, government, or a great 



creeping insects. , . tin- t • , c 



busmess. And this peculiarity 01 exposition 

 is not confined to the present writer alone, but seems una- 

 voidable by any author who seeks to make the subject under- 

 stood. It arises of course in some part from our common custom 

 of personifying nature for purposes of convenient, economical, 

 and vivid expression, but in much larger part, I am convinced, 

 from a more or less unconscious recognition of the fact that there 

 is an actual correspondence, or even an identity, between man's 

 way of effecting results, and nature's. It is not that nature thinks 

 things out as a man does, but that mind in a man works things out 

 as nature does. This must be true, indeed, on theoretical grounds, 

 else we must maintain that the mind of man is not an evolution 

 with its roots in the rest of nature, but a special creation of its 

 own separate kind; and against such a conception is arrayed all 

 of the natural knowledge we possess. In all exposition, therefore, 

 it is, as I think, scientifically correct as well as practically con- 

 venient, to personify nature. 



