40 
HOW PLANTS EMPLOY INSECTS TO WORK FOR THEM. 
to the bee visiting the flower as a model of industry. With a slight change of a 
couplet, adapting it to our present knowledge and to the lesson of mutual help- 
fulness, we may read : — 
How doth the little busy bee 
Improve each shining hour, 
While gathering honey day by day, 
To fertilize each flower. 
84. Such are the principal modes, thus far known (and when these are under- 
stood watchful eyes may discover other equally curious cases), in which flowers 
are prevented from breeding in and in, either wholly or to such extent as 
to keep up the vigor of the species. Such are some of the ways in which 
flowers are adapted to insects, and no doubt insects to flowers, for this end. 
Plants, destitute of the locomotion and volition which animals, at least the higher 
animals, enjoy, have the lack made up to them in these subtle and very various 
contrivances, by which the volition and locomotion of insects are made to serve 
them, even to secure their very existence. For, to say that these plants could 
continue to flourish without such aid is tantamount to saying, that these multi- 
farious, elaborate, and exquisite arrangements are superfluous, — which is past all 
belief. 
85. It is equally past belief that they are undesigned or accidental. No one 
has been able to describe them except in language which assumes that they are 
contrivances , adaptations for particular purposes , and the like ; and where many of 
them are best described they are said to “ transcend in an incomparable degree the 
contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of the most imag- 
inative man could suggest, with unlimited time at his disposal.” Now, no matter 
whether or not the flowers themselves with all these structures have been 
perfected step by step, through no matter how long a series of natural stages, 
— if these structures and their operations, which so strike the mind of the philos- 
opher no less than of the common observer that he cannot avoid calling them 
contrivances, do not argue intention, what stronger evidence of intention in Na- 
ture can there anywhere possibly be 1 If they do, such evidences are countless, 
and almost every blossom brings distinct testimony to the existence and provi- 
dence of a Designer and Ordainer, without whom, we may well believe, not merely 
a sparrow, not even a grain of pollen, may fall. 
