THE FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS BY INSECTS 
AND THEIR MUTUAL ADAPTATION 
FOR THAT FUNCTION.* 
Tue old idea, once a favorite topic with poets and divines, that 
the beauty of the external.world was intended exclusively to pro- 
mote the enjoyment of mankind, has suffered many severe shocks 
from the rude onslaughts of modern science. The discovery that 
the earth was a habitable and inhabited world, countless ages before 
man appeared upon the scene, might be explained on the hypothesis 
that it was thus becoming prepared for the advent of the master- 
piece of creation; the egotism of the human species might even 
survive the discouraging fact that gems of purest ray serene were 
born in the unfathomed caves of Silurian or Devonian oceans, and 
that flowers of the most perfect beauty were born to blush unseen 
in the midst of odlite or cretaceous deserts. The unpitying theory 
of the survival of the fittest, however, points relentlessly to the 
conclusion that man after all is not the raison d’étre of anything 
he sees around him except himself; that “jedes fiir sich” is the 
rule of nature ; that every organic being is contrived so as to have 
the best chance of supplying its own wants, and not for the sake 
of administering to the wants of others; in fact that the philoso- 
phy of science must, for the future, be an application to the realms 
of nature of the principle of self-love, such as even a Hobbes 
might accept. 
The volume before us, though full of minute details of empirical 
observation, is an important contribution to this philosophy of 
science. The main fact which forms the groundwork of Prof. 
Miiller’s observations is not new. Towards the close of the last 
century one of the keen observers of nature with which that period 
abounded, C. C. Sprengel, in his Das entdeckte Geheimniss der Na- 
tur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen, pointed out that a 
number of the different forms which the flowers of plants assume 
are obviously contrived for the purpose of attracting insects and 
of enabling them to carry away the pollen which is acre to 
* Die Befruchtung der Blumen durch Insekten und die gegenseitigen Anpassungen 
Erkenntniss des ursdchlichen Zusam: gen in der organ- 
lermann Müller. Leipzig: Engelman: 
