336 DARW1NIANISM. 



tendrils some inches long, and wjiich so resemble earth-worms, 

 that small fish or sea insects, mistaking them for real worms, and 

 approaching them for plunder, are sucked into the maw of their 

 enemy which, having no jaws, evidently lives by suction, as 

 he lies hiding his large body amongst the weeds, and only exposing 

 his cirri or tendrils." 



Dr. Erasmus Darwin's contemporaries talk with 

 admiration of such things in " his beautiful poem, the 

 Loves of the Plants ; " and no doubt he says much at 

 times that is quite worthy of the highest admiration. It 

 is only a problem, as he puts it, how " the tasteless 

 moisture of the earth is converted by the hop-plant into 

 a bitter juice." Can natural selection explain how 

 and not simply fable an accident that a first strange 

 tinge, falling into a proper recipient, proved an advantage 

 such that, in the struggle for existence, it gradually 

 developed what of plant there was into the hop-plant 

 that is ? And if natural selection can untie the knot 

 that may be supposed there, perhaps it can undo also 

 the somewhat harder one that lies in the midst of these 

 questions of Dr. Erasmus : " What induces the bee, who 

 lives on honey, to lay up vegetable powder for its young ? 

 What induces the butterfly to lay its eggs on leaves, 

 when itself feeds on honey ? What induces other flies 

 to seek a food for their progeny different from what they 

 consume themselves ? " Mr. Darwin cuts all such knots 

 with a sword of fictitious gradation, which, if even sharp 

 enough for the middle of a string of them, is all too 

 blunt to make any impression on a necessary first. For 

 his part, the grandfather would unbind all such knots in 

 reason. " If these " (actions), he says, referring to the 

 insects, " are not deductions from their own previous 

 experience or observation, all the actions of mankind 

 must be resolved into instinct." That is as much as to 

 say, if the manifestation of ideas in insects is to be 

 referred to instinct, and not to reason ; so neither must 



