decent interval of nine or ten years the Quarterly Review recanted, when an article by Mr. Wallace was admitted to its pages.1 In April, 1880, Professor Huxley delivered an Evening Lecture at the Royal Institution, on the "Coming-of-age of the Origin of Species," in which he was able to say that "the foremost men of science in every country are either avowed champions of its leading doctrines, or at any rate abstain from opposing them ;" and when the pulpits of England once more resounded with Mr. Darwin's name, it was to bear testimony to his noble character and his ardent pursuit of truth.

As Professor Huxley shows in the lecture already mentioned, successive discoveries have helped in a remarkable way to prove the soundness of Mr. Darwin's conclusions. In 1862 the archæopteryx was discovered, "an animal which in its feathers and the greater part of its organization is a veritable bird, while in other parts it is as distinctly reptilian." In 1875 toothed birds were found in the cretaceous formation in North America, completing the transitional forms between birds and reptiles; and as these pages are passing through the press we hear of a discovery at Oxford in another department of natural history which Mr. Darwin has examined and illuminated. The Utricularia, or bladderwort, growing in ditches, consumes, not only insects, but young fish! 3 Investigation in embryology has shown that "the first beginnings of all the higher forms

1 Geological Time and the Origin of Species.

2 Published in Science and Culture and Other Essays, 1881. 3A very interesting scientific fact has been recently discovered by an enthusiastic Oxford Naturalist. It has been well known for many years that certain plants, some of which are found in England, are carnivorous, and that they catch small insects and crustaceans by means of leaves modified to act as traps, and are nourished by the juices of the animals so caught. Mr. Sims has observed that one of these, by name Utricularia, which he has found growing in the brook in Christ Church meadow, not only consumes crustacea and insects, but also devours newly hatched fish. This is the first time on record that a carnivorous plant has been found to attack a vertebrate animal.

of animal life are similar; the geological record has introduced to us a multitude of extinct animals, the existence of which was previously hardly suspected," and "evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life," which Mr. Darwin in 1859 acknowledged to be lacking, has been so far supplied, that " if the doctrine of evolution had not existed, paleontologists (says Mr. Huxley) must have invented it." The marvellous success of the Origin of Species depended in the main, of course, upon the conclusiveness of its reasoning; but something must be allowed for the charm of the narrative, and more particularly for the admirable spirit in which it is written. Much of it is as interesting as a novel, even to the unscientific reader, and if the experience of the present writer is shared by others, the impression produced by the candour and modesty shown throughout the work is one of profound admiration for the author.

The Origin of Species is so well known that we are spared the necessity of saying much about Mr. Darwin's greatest work, and perhaps the greatest work of the present century. A single extract will furnish a sample of the many interesting facts which give so great a charm to this masterpiece of scientific reasoning. The passage in which Mr. Darwin shews that the abundance of a certain kind of clover may depend upon the number of cats has been quoted so often, that we will select another, showing the extraordinary adaptation of the Coryanthes to the purpose of fertilization.

This orchid has part of its labellum or lower lip hollowed out into a great bucket, into which drops of almost pure water continually fall from two secreting horns which stand above it; and when the bucket is half full, the water overflows by a spout on one side. The basal part of the labellum stands over the The Utricularia, commonly known as the bladder-wort, belongs to the natural order Lentibulariaceae; it grows generally in very foul ditches, its leaves are divided into a number of finger-like processes, and at the bases of the leaves are found the curious little oblong bladders provided with tentacles. It is by means of these bladders that the young fish are caught and devoured."-The Oxford Magazine, May 28th, 1884.

bucket, and is itself hollowed out into a sort of chamber with two lateral entrances; within this chamber there are curious fleshy ridges. The most ingenious man, if he had not witnessed what takes place, could never have imagined what purpose all these parts serve. But Dr. Crüger saw crowds of large humble-bees visiting the gigantic flowers of this orchid, not in order to suck nectar, but to gnaw off the ridges within the chamber above the bucket; in doing this they frequently pushed each other into the bucket, and their wings being thus wetted they could not fly away, but were compelled to crawl out through the passage formed by the spout or overflow. Dr. Crüger saw a "continual procession" of bees thus crawling out of their involuntary bath. The passage is narrow, and is roofed over by the column, so that a bee, in forcing its way out, first rubs its back against the viscid stigma and then against the viscid glands of the pollen-masses. The pollen-masses are thus glued to the back of the bee which first happens to crawl out through the passage of a lately expanded flower, and are thus carried away. Dr. Crüger sent me a flower in spirits of wine, with a bee which he had killed before it had quite crawled out with a pollen-mass still fastened to its back. When the bee, thus provided, flies to another flower, or to the same flower a second time, and is pushed by its comrades into the bucket and then crawls out by the passage, the pollen-mass necessarily comes first into contact with the viscid stigma, and adheres to it, and the flower is fertilised. Now at last we see the full use of every part of the flower: of the water-secreting horns, of the bucket half full of water, which prevents the bees from flying away, and forces them to crawl out through the spout, and rub against the properly placed viscid pollen-masses and the viscid stigma.

Mr. Wallace, in the paper already quoted, remarks upon the living interest which Mr. Darwin has imparted to the study of nature. He has been "enabled to bring to light innumerable hidden adaptations, and to prove that the most insignificant parts of the meanest living beings have a use and a purpose, are worthy of our earnest study, and fitted to excite our highest and most intelligent admiration.” Everyone who reads the Origin of Species will feel the truth of this observation, and of Mr. Darwin's concluding words—

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,

G

with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by Reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of lessimproved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

So successful was the work that Mr. Darwin did not find it necessary to publish all the volumes of accumulated facts which he had intended to supply by way of evidence; but a series of books of great interest and value appeared at intervals up to the time of his death, most of them bearing upon the Doctrine of Evolution. The first was the well-known book on Orchids' issued in 1862, and during the next six years he contributed to the Linnæan Society a number of papers, collected in the volume mentioned further on, and published in 1877. It was while he was engaged upon this investigation that he wrote the letter to the Rev. W. A. Leighton, which, through that gentleman's kindness, we are able to reproduce in facsimile. The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, in 1865, was followed

1 On the Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects. Many of these contrivances are adapted in a marvellous way to their purpose, and the reader will share the interest which Mr. Darwin felt in writing the book. "The study of these wonderful and often beautiful productions (he says) with all their many adaptations, with parts capable of movement, and other parts endowed with something so like, though no doubt different from, sensibility, has been to me most interesting."

in 1868 by one of the most laborious of Mr. Darwin's works, the Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, for which it is scarcely too much to say that the whole world was ransacked for materials. Amongst the many names mentioned, we find that of Mr. Eyton of Eyton several times; the breeds of wild turkeys in the parks of Lord Powis and Lord Hill are referred to; and to illustrate the power of transmitting peculiarities in plants Mr. Darwin quotes from the Rev. W. A. Leighton's Flora of Shropshire an interesting fact concerning a prostrate yew. "A weeping or rather a prostrate yew (Taxus baccata) was found in a hedge in Shropshire; it was a male, but one branch bore female flowers, and produced berries; these, being sown, produced seventeen trees, all of which had exactly the same peculiar habit with the parent tree." Some parts of the book were completed in 1858, and its publication was delayed by continued ill-health, though, in its array of facts and arguments, it bears no trace of any want of vigour.

The book (Mr. Thiselton Dyer says in Nature), "apart from its primary purpose produced a profound impression, especially on botanists. This was partly due to the undeniable force of the argument from analogy stated in a sentence in the introduction: Man may be said to have been trying an experiment on a gigantic scale; and it is an experiment which nature, during the long lapse of time, has incessantly tried.'

Like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, who was delighted to find that he had been unwittingly talking prose all his life, horticulturists who had unconsciously moulded 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 difficult to meet, was disarmed; these found themselves hoist with their own petard. Nor was this all. The exclusive province of science was in biological phenomena for ever broken