How seemingly unimportant are the movements of insects, creeping in and out of flowers in search of the nectar on which they feed! If we saw a man spending his time in watching them, and in noting their flitting with curious eyes, we might be excused for imagining that he was amusing himself by idling an hour luxuriously in observing things which, though curious, were trifling. But how mistaken might we be in such an assumption! For these little winged messengers bear to the mind of the philosophical naturalist tidings of mysteries hitherto unrevealed; and as Newton saw the law of gravitation in the fall of the apple, Darwin found, in the connection between flies and flowers, some of the most important facts which support the theory he has promulgated respecting the modification of specific forms in animated beings.

Indeed, Darwin was to the nineteenth century what Newton was to the seventeenth, and Einstein to the twentieth. It is curious that the theory of evolution constituted one of the most dramatic revolutions in the history of science. In the words of biologist and science historian Ernst Mayr, it “caused a greater upheaval in man’s thinking than any other scientific advance since the rebirth of science in the Renaissance.” The question, then, is: Where was Darwin’s blunder?

Life’s perhaps the only riddle

That we shrink from giving up!