110 PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES ON 



happy. Who can tell how many thousands of orchids have been 

 experimented on and wasted, in England and other places, until 

 someone discovered the way of keeping them alive and in health, 

 so as eventually to fascinate everybody with the beauty and 

 originality of their blooms. 



Their successful cultivation, when known, appears now as easy 

 as that of other plants. It is a repetition of the story of Columbus 

 and the egg. This is not all. The way of propagating them, 

 crossing them, and rearing new forms has been got at, so as to 

 confound botanists, who had made up their minds that there were 

 more species and genera among them than nature herself had 

 made. 



The adaptation of cultivated orchids to their new surroundings, 

 except where smoky fogs prevail, apj^ears in many instances to be 

 now perfect. Their struggle for life is not so keen as when they 

 were left solely to nature's care. Man's intelligence is there to 

 attend to their wants, to protect them from enemies, and to bring 

 about new variations, independent of struggles and surroundings 

 of insects. Now that the fact has been pointed out to us, insects 

 evidently had a great deal to do with the interminable variations 

 of orchid flowers. 



In endeavouring to follow what I have to say, the reader 

 should be prepared to discard from the botanical dictionary the word 

 impossible. In the evolution of plants there appears to be no 

 such thing as an impossible combination of cells. We see all sorts 

 of unexpected combinations, not only of different cells with different 

 functions, but of different parts, the cells of which have already 

 been differentiated into various organs with different functions. 



The bias of schools and teachers, of books and words, have 

 kept our minds too long chained to one or another authoritative 

 theory, excluding as impossible any other view, while in reality, 

 in nature, there is apparently no such thing as either authority, or 

 a fixed law, which forbids every other \dew as impossible in what 

 concerns life. There are, doubtless, branches of development in 

 certain directions where least resistance may be felt, but such 

 branches are infinite, and tied down only by heredity, by the 

 medium in which cells are developed, and the amount or nature 

 of impediments or helps, which the surroundings may furnish. 



In seaweeds we seem to have an almost complete series of forms, 

 from the simple cell to aggregates of cells, comparable, without 



