644 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



muscles, nerves, skin, hair, feathers, Ac, &c., and carries these 

 molecules to the exact parts of the body where and when they are 

 required, and brings into play the complex forces that alone can 

 build up with great rapidity so strangely complex a structure as a 

 feather adapted for flight." To this we may add — or as a limb for 

 running, or a paddle for swimming, &c. Either as an existing well- 

 established structure, or as any new modifications adapted to changed 

 conditions of life as occur in all varieties and species; for all the 

 above modifications of *' limbs '* arose somehow when required. 



What is thus very true of all members of the animal kingdom is 

 equally true of the vegetable. I have elsewhere shown that the flower 

 of a Salvia has nearly thirty distinct features, every one of which has 

 its " meaning " or " means " to an "end," viz. the transference of 

 the pollen from one flower, on the back of a bee, to another flower of the 

 same kind.* Twenty-two years ago my book was published on the Origin 

 of Floral Structures ; hy Self -Adaptation to the " direct action " of the 

 visiting insects, as Darwin would have said. Though it met with much 

 pleasantry from some writers, I gather from Dr. Wallace that he 

 perhaps would begin to take a slightly more favourable view of it than 

 in 1888 ; for though the idea of * Directivity * was not then to the fore, it 

 underlies the whole work. Some grounds for this hope rest on the 

 following words: " What we must assume is not merely a force, but 

 some agency which can and does apply, direct, guide, and co-ordinate a 

 great variety of forces ... so as to build up that infinitely complex 

 machine, the living organism, which is not only self -repairing, but 

 self -renewing, self-multiplying, self-adapting to its ever-changing 

 environment " — [The italics are minej.f 



Dr. Wallace, in discussing cell-division, asks the questions about 

 hving protoplasm : * ' What power gave it life ? It is also (in its 

 essential part, the nucleus) already highly differentiated — it is organized 

 protoplasm. What power organized it? . . . What power deter- 

 mines the cell-mass to take on this or other well-defined shapes? . . . 

 Who dr what guides or determines the atoms of the protoplasmic 

 molecules into the new combiriations chemically, and new structures 

 mechanically? " 



So, too, Mr. James Croll asked the same questions in 1872 : 

 *' What determines molecular motion — the fundamental problem of 

 life? " 



Finally, Dr. Wallace observes: "This orderly process is quite 

 unintelligible without some directive organizing power constantly at 

 work in or upon every chemical atom or physical molecule of the 

 whole structure." 



What, then, can natural selection find to do, if Directivity he so 

 supreme, as he describes it? Natural selection, after all, Darwin told 

 us in 1859, is only a Metaphor. 



* Introduction to Plant Ecology, p. 104. 



t P. 338. The title to my other volume of the International Scientific 

 Series is The Origin of Plant Structnrps hxj Self -Adaptation to the Environment. 



