356 THE SELF-FERTILIZATION OF PLANTS. 



point of view," which he has given to the mere ana- 

 tomical differences ; or, if he had but thought, for a mo- 

 ment, what physiological effect must be wrought by 

 anatomical changes ; and if he had heeded the almost 

 infinite number of hints which physiology has actually 

 obtruded, but in vain, upon him ; he would have been 

 spared the egregious blunders which he has made; 

 and, phenomena, instead of being insensately charac- 

 terized by him, in ignorant wonder, as " remarkable," 

 would have been fraught, to him, with knowledge of 

 laws, the simplest and most beautiful possible. 



Instead of being constrained, as he is, to regard his 

 facts with the awe the savage shows to his fetich, he 

 would have been enabled, a priori, to expect results 

 which, now, he says, he could not have believed pos- 

 sible. 



How any man, with the least tincture of scientific 

 habits of thought, could range through such varying 

 phenomena; could ignore the significance of their 

 almost infinite variations in quantity of effect; could 

 escape the conclusion, that the modification of a cer- 

 tain ratio of characters, underlies all the evil effects of 

 close-interbreeding and of self-fertilization; and could 

 so completely lull all of his scientific instincts, as to 

 formulate an iliflexible "law of nature," in derogation 

 of such a wide diversity of effects ; are mysteries which 

 can be explained, solely by resorting to the one 

 hypothesis that, "Motley's the only wear" for this 

 standard-bearer of modern thought; or, to the other 

 hypothesis, that the author of the Origin of Species 

 systematically and wilfully ignored the element of 



