94 How Theories are Manufactured 



that such guides are apt to prove misleading : grant all 

 their facts and the processes of what they call their 

 reasoning are still more extravagant. To come back to 

 the matter which has so long detained us. Suppose it 

 be a fact that birds acquire their taste for bright colours 

 by feeding on bright fruits : whence, then, did the fruits 

 get their brightness? Strange to say, from the same 

 birds ! So at least, most emphatically, does Mr. Grant 

 Allen inform us: "These fruits were specially coloured 

 to allure their eyes, just as Speedwells and Primroses 

 and Buttercups are specially coloured to allure the eyes 

 of Bee or Butterfly." 1 " Birds have a quick eye for 

 colour, especially for red and white : and therefore almost 

 all edible berries have assumed one or other of these two 

 hues." 2 " For this end, just as so many flowers have 

 bright-coloured petals to attract the eyes of insects, we 

 know that fruits have bright-coloured pulpy coverings to 

 attract the eyes of birds or mammals." 3 Surely for a 

 system that undertakes "to reduce the science of life 

 from chaos to rational order," this is the most admired 

 confusion that ever was. The birds acquire from bright 

 fruits that taste, which they must have, to make the 

 fruits bright ; and wherever we shall conclude that beauty 

 of hue first appeared, sense of such beauty must, on 

 Darwinian principles, have preceded it. Everywhere in 

 fact apparent dirce fades: the Absolute looms before us. 

 Once grant that there are things beautiful, and we must 

 come to a canon of beauty, which they did not make : 

 just as from the acknowledgment of truth, as such, we 

 must come to Truth that is eternal, and by talking of 

 creatures M higher" and "lower" in the scale, we im- 

 plicitly confess to a type of perfection. 



It is all very well embarking with a light heart on an 

 uncomprehended enterprise, to tell us that no conscious 

 purpose has been at work to produce what we admire, 

 but that man, recognizing in the work of Nature those 



1 Vignettes from Nature, p. 86. 



2 Evolutionist at Large, p. 22. 



3 Flowers and their Pedigrees, p. 263. 



