The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th EditionDarwin, Charles
History
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition
Darwin, Charles
Evolution (Biology); Natural selection
The construction of the flower in another closely allied orchid,
namely, the Catasetum, is widely different, though serving the same
end; and is equally curious. Bees visit these flowers, like those of
the Coryanthes, in order to gnaw the labellum; in doing this they
inevitably touch a long, tapering, sensitive projection, or, as I have
called it, the antenna. This antenna, when touched, transmits a
sensation or vibration to a certain membrane which is instantly
ruptured; this sets free a spring by which the pollen-mass is shot
forth, like an arrow, in the right direction, and adheres by its viscid
extremity to the back of the bee. The pollen-mass of the male plant
(for the sexes are separate in this orchid) is thus carried to the
flower of the female plant, where it is brought into contact with the
stigma, which is viscid enough to break certain elastic threads, and
retain the pollen, thus effecting fertilisation.
How, it may be asked, in the foregoing and in innumerable other
instances, can we understand the graduated scale of complexity and the
multifarious means for gaining the same end. The answer no doubt is, as
already remarked, that when two forms vary, which already differ from
each other in some slight degree, the variability will not be of the
same exact nature, and consequently the results obtained through
natural selection for the same general purpose will not be the same. We
should also bear in mind that every highly developed organism has
passed through many changes; and that each modified structure tends to
be inherited, so that each modification will not readily be quite lost,
but may be again and again further altered. Hence, the structure of
each part of each species, for whatever purpose it may serve, is the
sum of many inherited changes, through which the species has passed
during its successive adaptations to changed habits and conditions of
life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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