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HORTi CULTURE 



March 17, 1905 



The Innate Tendency of Life Toward Perfection 



Kecent articles in this periodical are suggestive of 

 interesting problems in plant life. The question 

 ■whether life has an inner tendency to advance was 

 asked long ago, and the great natural philosophers have 

 answered it in various ways. One of the most interest- 

 ing and deeply reasoned theories is that of Nageli, the 

 great German botanist and professor in Munich, who 

 held that there is internal perfecting force which brings 

 the evolution of organic being forward independently 

 of the struggle for existence; so that, according to 

 Nageli, even had there been limitless means and no 

 struggle for existence, no survival of the fittest and 

 death of the less fitted to survive, the progress of the 

 life-series would have been much the same as it has 

 been. His reasons were drawn from the nature of 

 force and matter as well as his own profound knowl- 

 edge of plant life and structure, and filled a book. 

 Lamarck early in the 19th century explained evolution 

 in a way which practically means that life has some- 

 thing in it which tends toward improvement. In ani- 

 mals this is the will of the animal to adapt himself to 

 the surroundings, which results in the modification of 

 his bodily structure through the increased use of special 

 parts; and in plants a power of the plant to adapt itself 

 directly to the environment, so that plants become 

 necessarily better and better adapted to their habitats. 

 Some botanists now hold to this definite improving 

 tendency in plants, and I recently listened to a long 

 paper by George Henslow before the Linnaean Society 

 of London, meant to prove that this is the way that 

 evolution comes about. Darwin, on the contrary, 

 thought that variation is blind, that some new varieties 

 are worse than the parents, some better, as determined 

 merely by accident; and that the better varieties are 

 'selected and kept by Nature, as Darwin figuratively put 

 it, and the worse allowed to die, and that thus life 

 actually advances without any distinct innate tendency 

 to progress. One of the best and most interesting con- 

 tributions to this subject is the work of Hyatt, the 

 Boston naturalist, on fossil mollusks of the Chambered 

 Nautilus kind. He was able to follow the history of 

 'some species from their rise in the earlier geologic days 

 to their extinction in later times and found that species 

 begin with rather simple form of shell, this becomes 

 more perfect and elaborate as time goes on, until the 

 highest development of the species is reached. After 

 that there is a decline, the shells become less elaborate 

 and simpler, and finally the race disappears. The his- 

 tory of one of these species is like that of a wave moving 

 over the surface of the ocean, which commences as a lit- 

 tle elevation, grows bigger and bigger to a maximum 

 and then dies out, its place taken by a succeeding wave 

 which seems to get its impulse from the decline of the 

 first. Or it is like the life of an individual, with in- 

 fancy, youth, vigorous manhood, old age, and death. 



Looking at the history of all life on earth we see two 

 opposite results. First there has been progress. The 



simplest green plants are very small spherical bodies, 

 of course without root, stem, or leaf; or rather the 

 plant-body is both root and leaf at the same time] that 

 is, it both absorbs nutrients and makes food for itself. 

 Two or three hundred of these plants must be placed 

 side by side to make an inch, and only when myriads 

 of them occur together do they catch the eye, not then 

 as distinct structures but as tinges of green on earth or 

 moist tree trunks, or a greenness of waters. These 

 forms represent a kind of vegetation that must have 

 been alone on the earth in very early times. Contrast- 

 ing with these we see the highest plants, enormous in 

 size, like the giant Sequoias and Eucalypts — the mul- 

 tiplication in mere bulk from the little green algea men- 

 tioned to these monsters being some millions of mil- 

 lions of times — and highly organized with root, stem, 

 leaf, flower, fruit, seed, wonderful in complexity, in 

 nice adaptation to life-work, in variety, in beauty and 

 in usefulness. When we look into their inner organiza- 

 tion with the eye of the microscope and find there a 

 perfection and adjustment of all little organs the won- 

 der becomes manifold. The effect is to compel one to 

 ask himself. Is it possible that mere chance variation 

 with selection in the struggle for existence, without any 

 natural and fundamental principle of progress, has 

 brought about such vast development, such multi- 

 tudinous forms and stages of perfection? 



On the other hand the simple plants still remain, 

 which must be of very ancient standing indeed since 

 wo know of still higher forms from the earliest fossil- 

 bearing beds. For inconceivable ages these little plants 

 have lived on, one generation succeeding another with- 

 out notable improvement, merely telling the same life- 

 story with untiring repetition through endless years. 

 There seems to be no internal perfecting principle in 

 them. And this condition is reiterated in each stage or 

 grade of evolution. The rocks have kept the record 

 for us and tell the story of inveterate conservatism on 

 the part of many forms — as well as of progress on the 

 part of others. To come to present-day species we find 

 some very interesting cases of fixity. There is a spe- 

 cies of Horsetail. Equisetum Telmateia, found on the 

 west coast of America from California to Alaska. The 

 same Horsetail occurs in Europe, North Africa and 

 .Asia Minor to Persia. Owing to the perishable nature 

 of the spheres, the species could not have been carried 

 in sphere-form from one region to the other. When we 

 consider the time which must have elapsed since there 

 was any common point of origin between the section 

 of the species in America and that on the opposite side 

 of the world, and further find that the only difference 

 which a careful study reveals, between the species here 

 and the species there, is the occurrence of microscopic 

 pores in the American forms, we realize that the organ- 

 ization of this plant is very fixed indeed. Of the same 

 character is the discovery, made by Gray, that the floras 

 of northeastern America and Japan have a striking 



