14 [318] 



DARWIN AND HUMBOLDT. 



journals and ephemeral publications of 

 all sorts and unexpectedly forced in- 

 to his service. Like Moliere's Mon- 

 sieur Jourdain, who was delighted to 

 find that he had been unwittingly 

 talking prose all his life, horticultur 

 ists who had unconsciously molded 

 plants almost at their will at the 

 impulse of taste or profit were at 

 once amazed and charmed to find 

 that they had been doing scientific 

 work and helping to establish a great 

 theory. The criticism of practical 

 men, at once most tenacious and dif- 

 ficult to meet, was disarmed ; these 

 found themselves hoisted with their 

 own petard. Nor "was this all. The 

 exclusive province of science was in 

 biological phenomena forever broken 

 down ; every one whose avocations in 

 life had to do with the rearing or use 

 of living things, found himself a party 

 to the " experiment on a gigantic 

 ycale," which had been going on 

 ever since the human race withdrew 

 for their own ends plants or animals 

 from the feral and brought them into 

 the domesticated state. 



Mr. Darwin with characteristic 

 modesty had probably underrated 

 the effect which the Origin of 

 Species would have as an argumenta- 

 tive statement of his views". When 

 he came to realize this, it probably 

 seemed to him unnecessary to submit 

 to the labor of methodizing the vast 

 accumulations which he had doubt- 

 less made for the second and third 

 installments of the detailed exposition 

 of the evidence which he had promised. 

 As was hinted at the commencement, 

 his attention was rather drawn away 

 from the study of evidence already 

 at the disposal of those who cared to 

 digest and weigh it, to the explora- 

 tion of the field of nature with the 

 new and penetrating instrument of 

 research which he had himself forged. 

 Something too must be credited to 

 the intense delight which he felt in 

 investigating the phenomena of liv- 

 ing things. But he doubtless saw 

 that the work to be done was to show 

 how morphological and physiological 

 complexity found its explanation 



from the principle of natural selec- 

 tion. This is the idea which is ever 

 dominant. Thus he concludes his 

 work on climbing plants: "It has 

 often been vaguely asserted that 

 plants are distinguished from animals 

 by not having the power of move- 

 ment. It should rather be said that 

 plants acquire and display this power 

 only when it is of some advantage to 

 them; this being of comparatively 

 rare occurrence, as they are affixed to 

 the ground, and food is brought to 

 them by the air and rain." The 

 diversity of the power of movement 

 in plants naturally engaged his atten- 

 tion, and the - last but one of his 

 works — in some respects perhaps the 

 most remarkable of his botanical 

 writings — was devoted to showing 

 that this diversity could be regarded 

 as derived from a single fundamental 

 property : " All the parts or organs 

 of every plant while they continue to 

 grow . . . are continually circumnuta- 

 ting." Whether this masterly con- 

 ception of the unity of what has 

 hitherto seemed a chaos of unrelated 

 phenomena will be sustained time 

 alone will show. But no one can 

 doubt the importance of what Mr. 

 Darwin has done in showing that for 

 the future the phenomena of plant 

 movement can and indeed must be 

 studied from a single point of view. 

 Along another line of work Mr. 

 Darwin occupied himself with show- 

 ing what aid could be given by the 

 principle of natural selection in ex- 

 plaining the extraordinary structural 

 variety exhibited by plant morpho- 

 logy. The fact that cross-fertilization 

 was an advantage, was the key with 

 which, as indicated in the pages of 

 the Origin of Si^ecies, the bizarre 

 complexities of orchid flowers could 

 be unlocked. The detailed facts were 

 set out in a well-known work, and the 

 principle is now generally accepted 

 with regard to flowers generally. The 

 work on insectivorous plants gave the 

 results of an exploration similar in its 

 object, and bringing under one com- 

 mon physiological point of view a 

 variety of the most diverse and 



