392 The Ways of the Orchids. 



types, archetypal patterns, or ideas, etc. The naturalist, thus 

 guided, sees that all homologous parts or organs, however 

 much diversified, are modifications of one and the same ances- 

 tral organ : in tracing existing gradations he gains a clue in 

 tracing, as far as that is possible, the probable course of a 

 modification during a long line of generations. He may feel 

 assured that, whether he follows embryological development, or 

 searches for the merest rudiments, or traces gradations be- 

 tween the most different beings, he is pursuing the same object 

 by different routes, and is tending towards the knowledge of 

 the actual progenitor of the group as it once grew and lived." 

 Following Robert Brown, Mr. Darwin resolves the orchid into 

 five simple parts, three sepals and two petals, and two com- 

 pounded parts, the column and the labellum. The latter he 

 considers as " formed of one petal and two petaloid stamens of 

 the outer whorl, likewise completely confluent." Those who 

 deny the modification for which Darwin contends would explain 

 the agreements and correspondences which he traces, by a 

 theory of " types;" but he asks " Can we, in truth, feel satis- 

 fied by saying that each orchid was created exactly as we now 

 see it, on a certain ideal type ; that the omnipotent Creator, 

 having fixed on one plan for the whole order, did not please to 

 depart from his plan ; that He, therefore, made the same organ 

 to perform divers functions — often of trifling importance com- 

 pared with their proper functions — converted other organs into 

 mere purposeless rudiments, and arranged all as if they had to 

 stand separate, and then made them cohere ? It is not a more 

 simple and intelligible view that all orchids owe what they have 

 in common to descent from some monocotyledonous plant, 

 which,' ]ike so many other plants of the same division, possessed 

 fifteen organs arranged alternately, three within three in five 

 whorls, and that the now wonderfully changed structure of the 

 flower is due to a long course of slow modifications — each modi- 

 fication having preserved that which was useful to each plant 

 during the incessant changes to which the organic and in- 

 organic world has been exposed." 



Thus speaks Mr. Darwin in defence of his ingenious scheme, 

 upon which we feel no call to pronounce sentence, because 

 the means of final decision do not as yet exist. To prove 

 inductively what really was the order of the universe in any 

 great group of facts, requires that we should have a completo 

 series of the facts before us, which in this case we have not. 

 To prove deductively the correctness of any hypothesis, demands 

 the previous establishment of the general laws from which the 

 particular phenomena spring, and this has not yet been done. 

 We are entitled to say to Mr. Darwin : we suspend decision with 

 more or less doubt against you, because, as you know, your 



