THE ORIGIN OF LIFE Si 



docks, and nettles, which are all fertilised through the 

 agency of the wind. As Gray has well observed, 

 this at best cannot give us an origin for either flowers 

 or honey-seeking insects. Both must have originated 

 in some different way. All that it can pretend to 

 account for is a certain amount of subsequent change. 

 It fails even to account for this, since the gay flowers 

 are correlated with a vast number of other properties 

 of the plants in question, with which the insects could 

 have nothing to do, and without which they might as 

 well have continued to be fertilised by the wind. 

 Why, indeed, should not the wind be the cause of 

 wind-fertilisation as well as the insects the cause of 

 gay flowers ? And, further, why may not the honey, 

 which in some mysterious way is associated with the 

 gay flowers, be the cause of the suctorial proboscis of 

 the insects, since it surely existed before there were 

 honey-feeding insects, though to a wind-fertilised 

 plant the honey must have been a loss and injury, 

 until it could attract insects by the gay flowers, on 

 the hypothesis, as yet non-existent? Such hypo 

 theses of natural selection, in short, amount to 

 nothing more than a confusion of correlated natural 

 agencies with causation. 



Still another curious question arises with referent 

 to the use of cross-fertilisation. There can be no 

 question that the use of this in nature is not merely 

 to increase the fertility of the individual plants, but 

 so to intermix individual varieties as to keep the 



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