40 HOW PLANTS EMPLOY INSECTS TO WORK FOR THEM. 



to the bee visiting the flower as a model of industry. With a slight change of a 

 couplet, adapting it to our present knowledge and to the lesson of mutual help- 

 fulness, we may read : — 



How doth the little busy bee 



Improve each shining hour, 

 While gathering honey day by day, 



To fertilize each flower. 



84. Such are the principal modes, thus far known (and when these are under- 

 stood watchful eyes may discover other equally curious cases), in which flowers 

 are prevented from breeding in and in, either wholly or to such extent as 

 to keep up the vigor of the species. Such are some of the ways in which 

 flowers are adapted to insects, and no doubt ■ insects to flowers, for this end. 

 Plants, destitute of the locomotion and volition which animals, at least the higher 

 animals, enjoy, have the lack made up to them in these subtle and very various 

 contrivances, by which the volition and locomotion of insects are made to serve 

 them, even to secure their very existence. For, to say that these plants could 

 continue to flourish without such aid is tantamount to saying that these multi- 

 farious, elaborate, and exquisite arrangements are superfluous, — which is past all 

 belief. 



85. It is equally past belief that they are undesigned or accidental. No one 

 has been able to describe them except in language which assumes that they are 

 contrivances, adaptations for particular purposes, and the like ; and where many of 

 them are best described they are said to " transcend in an incomparable degree the 

 contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of the most imag- 

 inative man could suggest, with unlimited time at his disposal." Now, no matter 

 whether or not the flowers themselves with all these structures have been 

 perfected step by step, through no matter how long a series of natural stages, 

 — if these structures and their operations, which so strike the mind of the philos- 

 opher no less than of the common observer that he cannot avoid calling them 

 contrivances, do not argue intention, what stronger evidence of intention in Na- 

 ture can there anywhere possibly be t If they do, such evidences are countless, 

 and almost every blossom brings distinct testimony to the existence and jjrovi- 

 dence of a Designer and Ordainer, without whom, we may well believe, not merely 

 a sparrow, not even a grain of pollen, may fall. 



