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But victory complete and demoralizing to his opponents awaited this oracular utterance when later a disciple of Darwin, led by the same spirit of faith and conviction, visited Madagascar, and was soon able to affirm that he had caught the moth, a huge sphinx-moth, and that its tongue measured eleven inches in length.
Here is one which presents a pair of tiny clubs to the sphinx-moth at its threshold, gluing them to its bulging eyes. Another attaches similar tokens to the tongues of butterflies, while the cypripedium speeds its parting guest with a sticking-plaster smeared all over its back. And so we might continue almost indefinitely.
Blossoms whose functions, through long eras of adaptation, have gradually shaped themselves to the forms of certain chosen insect sponsors; blossoms whose chalices are literally fashioned to bees or butterflies; blossoms whose slender, prolonged nectaries invite and reward the murmuring sphinx-moth alone, the floral throat closely embracing his head while it attaches its pollen masses to the bulging eyes, or perchance to the capillary tongue!
We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle? yet all these organs, serving for such different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modifications of an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillæ.
Hence the same names can be given to the homologous bones in widely different animals. We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle?
We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle? yet all these organs, serving for such different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modifications of an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillae.
The sphinx-moth again, one of the lesser of the group. A larger individual might sip the nectar, it is true, but its longer tongue would reach the base of the tube without effecting the slightest contact with the pollen, which is of course the desideratum here embodied, and which has reference to a tongue corresponding to the length of the nectary. There are many of these smaller sphinxes.
The evolution of the long nectary implies an adaptation to an insect's tongue of equal length. What insect has a tongue five inches long, and sufficiently slender to probe this nectary? The sphinx-moth only. Hence we infer the sphinx-moth to be the insect complement to the blossom, and we may correctly infer, moreover, that the flower is thus a night-bloomer.
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