A LIVING MYSTERY. 739 



plants ; or rather, the resulting new organism is the outcome of a 

 compromise, perhaps even of a struggle for mastery, between all 

 the parts or component elements of the two parent plants. Hence, 

 in all species, animal or vegetable alike, the young on the whole 

 tend to resemble both parents equally, but in different modes of 

 combination, which give them each what we call individuality, 

 and so make them really and truly new plants, not mere reissues 

 of either parent form. 



When I had written thus far on this present article, I laid 

 down my pen for a little rest, and strolled out alone upon the dry 

 African hill-side, a lower shoulder of the Atlas range, that stands 

 opposite the villa whence I date these words. By a curious co- 

 incidence, as I rambled through the lentisk scrub, I happened to 

 light upon a little bed of natural hybrid orchids, which so admira- 

 bly illustrate the nature of this peculiar intermixture that I joy- 

 fully accepted them to point the moral with which I must close 

 this long lay sermon. Numbers of a large and handsome yellow 

 orchid grow on the slopes of that particular hill, and in and out 

 among them spring members of another yet closely related spe- 

 cies, dingier brown, and different in shape, disposition of parts, 

 and general appearance. Some wandering bee, visiting a flower 

 of the yellow orchid at this spot where I stood, had carried away 

 on his head its gummy pollen-masses, and then, contrary to the 

 common habit of bees (who generally visit only one particular 

 species of plant at a time), had deposited them on the stigma of a 

 neighboring brown specimen. I suppose he was a young and in- 

 experienced insect, who had not yet learned to avoid the bad prac- 

 tice of mixing his honeys. From this chance fertilization any 

 number of hybrids had taken their rise, all of them more or less 

 resembling in certain respects both parents. In most cases they 

 had, to a great extent, the distinctive shapes of the brown kind, 

 with a preponderating amount of yellow color. But among them 

 all they presented every possible intermediate type between the 

 two parent forms. It seemed to me that this accidental find 

 exactly fitted in with the subject of my paper. We see here how 

 each embryo seed, separately impregnated by a pollen-grain from 

 another plant, grows out with a tendency to reproduce both an- 

 cestral forms equally, and how the conflict between the two ten- 

 dencies, both of which can not fully be realized, produces in the 

 end an individual compromise — a something which is not quite 

 either, but which combines in varying and incalculable degrees 

 the strongest points of both. 



Unless I mistake, we have here the solution (suggested in the 

 main by Mr. Herbert Spencer) for one of the deepest and most fun- 

 damental problems of all life, animal or vegetable — the problem of 

 reproduction, heredity, and individual variation. 



