256 FERTILISATION 



to give this essay a permanent value. The following passage 

 (p. 43) gives a true picture : — 



" Notwithstanding the extent and variety of his botanical 

 work, Mr. Darwin always disclaimed any right to be regarded 

 as a professed botanist. He turned his attention to plants, 

 doubtless because they were convenient objects for studying 

 organic phenomena in their least complicated forms ; and this 

 point of view, which, if one may use the expression without 

 disrespect, had something of the amateur about it, was in 

 itself of the greatest importance. For, from not being, till he 

 took up any point, familiar with the literature bearing on it, 

 his mind was absolutely free from any prepossession. He 

 was never afraid of his facts, or of framing any hypothesis, 

 however startling, which seemed to explain them. ... In any 

 one else such an attitude would have produced much work 

 that was crude and rash. But Mr. Darwin — if one may 

 venture on language which will strike no one who had con- 

 versed with him as over-strained — seemed by gentle persua- 

 sion to have penetrated that reserve of nature which baffles 

 smaller men. In other words, his long experience had given 

 him a kind of instinctive insight into the method of attack of 

 any biological problem, however unfamiliar to him, while he 

 rigidly controlled the fertility of his mind in hypothetical 

 explanations by the no less fertility of ingeniously devised 

 experiment." 



To form any just idea of the greatness of the revolution 

 worked by my father's researches in the study of the fertilisa- 

 tion of flowers, it is necessary to know from what a condition 

 this branch of knowledge has emerged. It should be re- 

 membered that it was only during the early years of the 

 present century that the idea of sex, as applied to plants, 

 became firmly established. Sachs, in his ' History of Botany ' 

 (1875), has given some striking illustrations of the remark- 

 able slowness with which its acceptance gained ground. He 

 remarks that when we consider the experimental proofs given 



