FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS BY INSECTS. 271 
ciding with Von Martius in the supposition that the Marajé 
mounds were made by Indians of Tupi descent. There are 
many resemblances between the pottery of Marajé and that of 
Peru and North America that will be worth study. I hope that 
future explorations will enable me to clear up some of the doubts 
expressed in this paper, and cast much needed light on the ancient 
races of the Amazonian valley. 
APPLICATION OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY TO 
LOWERS AND THE INSECTS WHICH 
VISIT THEM.* 
Tue first impression which flowers make upon us with the beauty 
of their radiate and symmetrical forms, their luxuriant display of 
colors and the variety and sweetness of their odors, easily begets 
in us the idea that they were created for delighting and gratifying 
our senses. 
This, however, is a pleasing fancy which the Darwinian doctrine 
speedily annihilates. This doctrine teaches us that all the species 
of animals and plants now in existence are only the result of the 
same laws which, starting from the beginning of organic life on 
the earth and coming down to our day, have governed and continue 
to govern all animated things ; and these are the laws of hereditary 
transmission and variation, of the struggle for existence and the 
consequent necessity that only those forms survive which best 
respond to external circumstances. 
According to the Darwinian doctrine all the characteristics and 
properties of animals and plants appeared at first only as simple, 
individual variations, which were a necessary consequence of deter- 
minate physical and chemi¢éal actions,t and which, if they have 
urse delivered by Dr. ERM. MULLER of asa at the 26th General Assem- 
vy of the parne orischen Verein für Rhein land un d Westphalen, 1869. Translated 
m the German with A f. FREDERIC DELPINO. Trans- 
rahe for eas NATURALIST from the Italian by R. E PACKARD. 
+ The lively sense of fı 
discourse cannot dissuade me from expressing my own views whenever they rarae 
hl +h, aft thi: 
from his 
nomena of individual ‘variations subsequently fixed Dy the la the laws of hereditary Goa, 
