How Theories are Manufactured 91 



which eat the berries, attracted by their bright colour 

 and pleasant taste, not only aid in dispersing them, but 

 also die after swallowing them, and become huge manure 

 heaps for the growth of the young plant." This grue- 

 some little romance I have had occasion to notice in 

 a former paper, 1 wherein I ventured to propose two 

 obvious questions : first, whether this remarkable ar- 

 rangement has ever been verified in fact; second, how 

 it comes, on principles of Natural Selection, that 

 creatures so stupid, as the Robins would thus appear to 

 be, have managed to survive in the struggle for exist- 

 ence. The author, since he first told the Arum's story 

 in his Evolutionist at Large? has somewhere been 

 confronted by questions to the same effect, which, 

 in a later work, Flowers and their Pedigrees^ he 

 notices. 3 



After recounting the murderous tale substantially as 

 before, he proceeds thus to qualify his former categorical 

 account. " I will not positively assert that it is for this 

 reason the Cuckoo -pint has acquired its poisonous 

 juices ; but I cannot help seeing that if any berry 

 happened to show a tendency in such a direction, and 

 so occasionally poisoned the creatures which eat it, it 

 would thereby obtain an advantage in the struggle for 

 existence, and would tend to increase the poisonous 

 habit so far as it continued to obtain any further 

 advantage by so doing. . . . Poisonous berries are 

 unquestionably useful to the plants which bear them. 

 . . . It is impossible, in fact, that a plant should not 

 benefit by having its berries poisonous, and so some 

 plants must necessarily^ in the infinite variability of 

 nature, acquire the property of killing their friendly 

 allies." 



Here, then, habemus confitentem reum : the pathetic 

 story Mr. Grant Allen has told us as to who killed 

 Cock Robin is exactly on a par with the veracious 



1 See Essay on Mr. Grant Allen's Botanical Fables. 



2 P. 86. 

 3 P. 263. The italics are mine. 



