diminished. In the comprehensive and far-reaching teleology which may take
the place of the former narrow conceptions, organs and even faculties,
useless to the individual, find their explanation and reason of being.
Either they have done service in the past, or they may do service in the
future. They may have been essentially useful in one way in a past species,
and, though now functionless, they may be turned to useful account in some
very different way hereafter. In botany several cases come to our mind
which suggest such interpretation.

Under this view, moreover, waste of life and material in organic Nature
ceases to be utterly inexplicable, because it ceases to be objectless. It
is seen to be a part of the general "economy of Nature," a phrase which has
a real meaning. One good illustration of it is furnished by the pollen of
flowers. The seeming waste of this in a pine-forest is enormous. It gives
rise to the so-called "showers of sulphur," which every one has heard of.
Myriads upon myriads of pollen-grains (each an elaborate organic structure)
are wastefully dispersed by the winds to one which reaches a female flower
and fertilizes a seed. Contrast this with one of the close-fertilized
flowers of a violet, in which there are not many times more grains of
pollen produced than there are of seeds to be fertilized; or with an
orchis-flower, in which the proportion is not widely different. These
latter are certainly the more economical; but there is reason to believe
that the former arrangement is not wasteful. The plan in the violet-flower
assures the result with the greatest possible saving of material and
action; but this result, being close-fertilization or breeding in and in,
would, without much doubt, in the course of time, defeat the very object of
having seeds at all.[XIII-3] So the same plant produces other flowers also,
provided with a large surplus of pollen, and endowed (as the others are
not) with color, fragrance, and nectar, attractive to certain insects, which
are thereby induced to convey this pollen from blossom to blossom, that it