24 Who painted the Flowers ? 



at least to the majority of minds, to say nothing of their 

 authors, simply phrases, and mean nothing. "Some 

 people," says Dr. Asa Gray, 1 "conceive of unconscious 

 purpose. This to most minds seems like conceiving of 

 white blackness." It must needs be a hyper-meta- 

 physical disquisition which has such a concept for a 

 theme, and I wish to deal not with speculative, but with 

 observed fact. Supposing the production of beauty to 

 be like everything else in nature, the result of law, 2 I 

 wish to ask how far the facts that we can see bear out 

 the theory that insects have been even the sole instru- 

 ments for the production of beauty in our gardens and 

 our fields. This is a pure question of natural science, 

 which can be discussed without any a priori preposses- 

 sions. To allow the insects all that is claimed for them 

 would not be to deny that there is a law : it would be 

 to make the law inconceivably more wonderful. The 

 checks and counter-checks of the system must be indeed 

 of marvellous complexity, if insects working directly for 

 food, and indirectly serving to the propagation of species, 

 and being allured by colour as an indication of food, 

 and so serving more indirectly to propagate colour, 

 should under the guidance of one unvarying taste 

 have produced, in respect of colour, such bewildering 

 variety, and through all variety have in every direction 

 hit upon the beautiful : wonderful indeed would it be 

 that not only they should have dyed different blossoms 

 with all the different colours of the rainbow, but that 

 they should have managed these different materials with 

 such exquisite diversity ; spotting the Foxglove, and 

 streaking the Iris, and yet refraining from painting the 

 Lily, while yet in each case the result has been such 

 that we can conceive none fitter. 



As a plain matter of fact then, how does the observa- 



1 Contemporary Review, April, 1882, p. 609. 



2 " Lawless, or really random variation, would be a strange 

 anomaly in this world of law, and a singular conclusion to be reached 

 by those who insist upon the universality of natural law " (Dr. Asa 

 Gray, loc. cit. ). 



