THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 97 
excluded)—then why should not this imperfect crea- 
tive faculty in man be the very guarantee that God 
' possesses it in perfection ? 
Such at least is the conclusion of one who, 
studying certain families of plants, which indulge in 
the most fantastic varieties of shape and size, and 
yet through all their vagaries retain—as do the 
Palms, the Orchids, the Euphorbiaceze—one organ, 
or form of organs, peculiar and highly specialized, 
yet constant throughout the whole of each family, 
has been driven to the belief that each of these three 
families, at least, has “sported off” from one com- 
mon ancestor—one archetypal Palm, one archetypal 
Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, 
in itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of 
new and complex beauty, to be developed, not in it, 
but in its descendants. He has asked himself, sitting 
alone amid the boundless wealth of tropic forests, 
whether even then and there the great God might 
not be creating round him, slowly but surely, new 
forms of beauty? If he chose to do it, could He not 
do it? That man found himself none the worse 
H 
