PROFESSOR TYND ALL'S ADDRESS. 673 



mitting the qualities which secured its maintenance, but transmitting 

 them in different degrees. The struggle for food again supervenes, 

 and those to whom the favorable quality has been transmitted in ex- 

 cess will assuredly triumph. It is easy to see that we have here the 

 addition of increments favorable to the individual still more rigorously 

 carried out than in the case of domestication ; for not only are un- 

 favorable specimens not selected by Nature, but they are destroyed. 

 This is what Mr. Darwin calls " Natural Selection," which " acts by 

 the preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, 

 each profitable to the preserved being." With this idea he interpene- 

 trates and leavens the vast store of facts that he and others have col- 

 lected. We cannot, without shutting our eyes through fear or preju- 

 dice, fail to see that Darwin is here dealing, not with imaginary, but 

 with true causes ; nor can we fail to discern what vast modifications 

 may be produced by natural selection in periods sufficiently long. 

 Each individual increment may resemble what mathematicians call a 

 "differential" (a quantity indefinitely small) ; but definite and great 

 changes may obviously be produced by the integration of these infini- 

 tesimal quantities through practically infinite time. 



If Darwin, like Bruno, rejects the notion of creative power acting 

 after human fashion, it certainly is not because he is unacquainted 

 with the numberless exquisite adaptations on which this notion of a 

 supernatural artificer has been founded. His book is a repository of 

 the most startling facts of this description. Take the marvelous 

 observation which he cites from Dr. Crtiger, where a bucket with an 

 aperture, serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid. Bees visit the 

 flower : in eager search of material for their combs they push each 

 other into the bucket, the drenched ones escaping from their involun- 

 tary bath by the spout. Here they rub their backs against the viscid 

 stigma of the flower and obtain glue ; then against the pollen-masses, 

 which are thus stuck to the back of the bee and carried away. " When 

 the bee, thus provided, flies to another flower, or to the same flower a 

 second time, and is pushed by his comrades into the bucket, and then 

 crawls out by the passage, the pollen-mass upon its back necessarily 

 comes first into contact with the viscid stigma," which takes up the 

 pollen ; and this is how that orchid is fertilized. Or take this other 

 case of the Catasetiim. " Bees visit these flowers in order to onaw 

 the labellum ; on doing this they inevitably touch a long, tapering, 

 sensitive projection. This, when touched, transmits a sensation or 

 vibration to a certain membrane, which is instantly ruptured, setting 

 free a spring, by which the pollen-mass is shot forth like an arrow in 

 the right direction, and adheres by its viscid extremity to the back of 

 the bee." In this way the fertilizing pollen is spread abroad. 



It is the mind thus stored with the choicest materials of the tele- 

 ologist that rejects teleology, seeking to refer these wonders to natural 

 causes. They illustrate, according to him, the method of Nature, not 

 VOL. v.— 43 



