THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS
of the telephone, to deny his existence, nor to cease to admire him and his work. Moreover, by understanding the telephone he was in a position to understand its inventor more intelligently and to regard him with more admiration and reverence.
Do we enjoy the modern delicious varieties of fruits and vegetables and the wonderfully beautiful horticultural forms and colors of flowers? These were produced, not by Nature unaided, but by Nature aided by Man. The success of men in breeding the numerous horticultural varieties of plants depended upon their understanding the processes by which new forms of plant life come into existence.
But an understanding of the method by which the present condition of the plant kingdom was brought about has value from an entirely different point of view. It gives us a more intelligent comprehension of Nature, it widens our intellectual horizon, it reveals a world of law and order, not of caprice and chance, and it enables us better to understand ourselves and our relation to the world in which we live.
In the earlier periods of intellectual inquiry men endeavored to reach an understanding of Nature by philosophical speculation. But, as Mackenzie[1] has well said, just as the special sciences cannot furnish us with those ultimate explanations for which the human mind inevitably looks, so “no purely philosophical speculation can tell us about the particular structure of the world in which we find ourselves.” There is only one source of evidence and light, and that is the study of Nature itself. If we would know how the present condition of the plant world came about we must study plants. Let us, then, briefly present some of the more important general truths that have been brought to light by the study of plants.
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