£8 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



in all their beauty and variety. The old idea that they were 

 made for man to admire and enjoy is exploded, and yet it re- 

 mains true that they were made to be admired and enjoyed by 

 creatures capable of admiration and esthetic pleasure. It is 

 not true that any flower was ever ' ' born to blush unseen ' ' or 

 ' ' waste its fragrance on the desert air. ' ' There is a standard 

 of taste so universal that what pleases the bee, the ant, and 

 the butterfly, also pleases the senses of man. Biology has 

 overthrown the anthropocentric theory as astronomy has the 

 geocentric, and every creature lives in and for itself and shares 

 with man to some degree the sublime attributes of mind and 

 soul.* 



Origin of bright-colored and sweet-flavored fruits. — In seek- 

 ing the origin of fruits we have to consider an almost parallel 

 history of development to that which we have been studying 

 in accounting for flowers. But here we must look to another 

 kind of animal life, chiefly to the great family of birds. There 

 were probably no bright-colored or sweet-flavored fruits until 

 the close of Mesozoic time, because the future birds were as 

 yet reptiles crawling over the ground or swimming in the wa- 

 ters, albeit some of them already possessed the inchoate attri- 

 butes of their avian successors. Moreover, the vegetation of 

 that early period was incapable of employing the intervention 

 of winged life for its distribution. At first it consisted exclu- 

 sively of spore-bearing plants whose dissemination was chiefly 

 affected by the wind, and which depended upon the infinite 

 multiplication of spores to make up for defective means of dis- 

 tribution. Iyater came on the gymnospermous types of cyca- 

 dean and coniferous life, neither of which are now to any gre'at 

 extent adapted to the uses of the feathered world. Paleon- 



* Here and later on I use the term soul in the sense of conscious desire 

 strong enough to induce active effort for its satisfaction. 



