Dissecting Needle Among Orchids

The dissecting needle on my table at Down was ground for the barnacles, eight years of Cirripedes, every valve and peduncle, and now it lies among the orchid flowers doing work its maker never imagined. A tool made to separate crustacean parts has become the instrument by which I probe the rostellum of a Madagascar angraecum, guessing at a moth with a tongue long enough to reach the nectar at the spur’s bottom. The needle outlived its purpose. The purpose did not outlive the needle.

I confess I did not at first see anything in this worth a note. But the bulletin that reached me this week - a summary of some modern inquiry into markets, sent by a correspondent who knows my weakness for accumulated data - describes a curious regularity: certain weeks in which men buy and sell claims upon claims, the weeks when those claims expire, show a small persistent premium of return, some fraction of a percent, attributed to the hedging manoeuvres of the dealers themselves. The dealers created their instruments to shift risk. The instruments now generate a pattern that exists only because the instruments exist, feeding on the hedging that feeds on them.

What I cannot yet understand is where the causation settles. With the barnacle needle the case was plain: the tool persisted, the task changed, and no one was confused. Here the tool and the task seem to breed each other. The hedging makes the premium; the premium attracts traders; the traders’ activity deepens the hedging. I have seen this shape before in the spread of species across an archipelago, each adaptation opening the ground for the next, no original purpose anywhere in the strata, only layer upon layer of consequence. Yet in the markets the layers turn over in weeks, not in epochs, and my geological patience is of no use to me. Whether the premium is a real property of the system or an artifact of the measuring - whether the needle cuts anything at all or merely leaves its own mark on the flesh - I cannot say.

The expiry weeks came again this month, and the figures, so far as my correspondent reports them, held to the pattern. I am still watching.