No. 507] BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 



161 



It has been stated that one of the greatest services 

 rendered by Darwin to the study of natural history was 

 the revival of teleology. The presence of this mode of 

 thought in his work shows no better anywhere than in 

 his work on the movements of plants, where it apparently 

 afforded to him one of his liveliest interests. In the light 

 of the present disfavor into which teleological interpreta- 

 tions have fallen these statements, which are indeed in 

 accord with the mental attitude of Darwin, require some 

 comment. It is not that one need raise one's voice in 

 favor of teleology as such, to apologize for his purposeful 

 explanations of the form and function of organs; but it 

 should in justice be said that it is where teleological evi- 

 dence and teleological reasoning are accepted as a finality 

 or where they lead to prejudgment that the most mischief 

 is done. Darwin's whole make-up and trend of thought 

 was such as to make him turn to immediate causal ex- 

 planations for natural phenomena and he unquestionably 

 was a teleologist, but in the main his interpretations were 

 tempered by common sense, intellectual reserve and 

 balanced judgment. It has been rightly said, too, that 

 his teleology had a far wider and more coherent plan than 

 that of his predecessors and it may be added it was less 

 positive than that of some of his contemporaries and 

 some of those that followed him. 



It is wholly natural that with a mind like his, which 

 ranks him with the greatest correlaters and unifiers of 

 loose facts that the world has known he should also 

 have attempted to unify the explanations of the phe- 

 nomena examined in his botanical researches and his posi- 

 tion as to the fundamental nature of circumnutation was 

 no doubt a result of his temperamental attitude towards 

 large questions. But while we need not necessarily fol- 

 low him in all of his generalizations the fact remains that 

 he did no inconsiderable service to botanical science if in 

 no other way than, at least, in showing what may be 

 learned from the close and careful examination of the 

 Plant as a living organism. 



