288 FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS BY INSECTS. 
If we turn from those Lepidoptera, which, endowed with a long 
proboscis, hover without alighting, and suck honey from the bot- 
tom of flowers with the longest tubes, and regard those which 
are of an inferior grade of adaptation, we find all possible grada- 
tions from a long proboscis to a rudimentary one, where the buc- 
cal parts are yet recognizable under the form of small fleshy 
papille equally unsuited either to bite or suck. According to the 
Darwinian doctrine, all Lepidoptera are derived from a single 
stock, and their characteristic spiral proboscis must have been 
formed gradually by slight and innumerable variations, which in 
the struggle for existence, were advantageous to those individuals 
in which they appeared, and were, therefore, able to accumulate 
and become fixed in their posterity in accordance with the laws of 
hereditary transmission. Therefore, as a necessary consequence 
of this doctrine, we should expect to find that the order Lepidop- 
tera offers in its lowest stage this characteristic of a spiral pro- 
boscis, and -possesses those fleshy protuberances or rudimentary 
buccal organs which we see to-day possessed by not a few of its 
representatives. This conjecture, strictly deduced from the Dar- 
winian doctrine, accords wonderfully with the opinion of entomol- 
ogists of great authority, who admit that there is the closest af- 
finity between the Phryganeidz and Lepidoptera; and the Phry- 
ganeidz have the buccal organs precisely in that rudimentary State 
which we should pre-suppose appropriate to the primordial race or 
type of Lepidoptera. And, further, to consider this affinity of the 
Phryganeide with butterflies, Réaumur deduced it from general 
considerations upon the analogies of the insects; De Geer from 
the analogous form of the wings, and from the internal struc- 
ture of the larvee ; Kirby from analogies in the buccal organs, and 
Westwood from the habits of the case-bearing larve of the genera 
Psyche and Tinea, from the analogous covering of the wings 
in the Phryganeide and some Papilios, and from the tibiæ analo- 
gously spinose in the two groups. 
The expression, ‘‘ close affinity,” employed by these entomolo- 
gists is changed and resolved, in the language of the Darwinian 
doctrine, into close relationship, and signifies that both Lepidoptera 
and Phryganeide proceed from a single stock, which, both in the 
internal structure of its larvee.and their habit of dragging a sheath 
about with them, in the venation and covering of the wings, the 
spinose character of the tibiæ, the buccal organs reduced to fleshy 
al 
