PUBLICATIONS. 



73 



praised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest ( 

 comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that " I have j 

 worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do f 

 more than this." I remember when in Good Success Bay, i 

 in Tierra del Fuego, thinking (and, I believe, that I wrote 

 home to the effect) that I could not employ my life better 

 than in adding a little to Natural Science. This I have done 

 to the best of my abilities, and critics may say what they like, 

 but they cannot destroy this conviction. 



During the two last months of 1859 I was fully occupied 

 in preparing a second edition of the ' Origin,' and by an 

 enormous correspondence. On January ist, i860, I began 

 arranging my notes for my work on the ' Variation of Ani- 

 mals and Plants under Domestication ; ' but it was not pub- 

 lished until the beginning of 1868 ; the delay having been 

 caused partly by frequent illnesses, one of which lasted seven 

 months, and partly by being tempted to publish on other sub- 

 jects which at the time interested me more. 



On May 15th, 1862, my little book on the * Fertilisation of 

 Orchids,' which cost me ten months' work, was published: 

 most of the facts had been slowly accumulated during several 

 previous years. During the summer of 1839, and, I believe, 

 during the previous summer, I was led to attend to the cross- 

 fertilisation of flowers by the aid of insects, from having come 

 to the conclusion in my speculations on the origin of species, 

 that^ crossing played an important part in keeping specific 

 forms constant. I attended to the subject more or less dur- 

 ing every subsequent summer; and my interest in it was 

 greatly enhanced by having procured and read in November 

 1841, through the advice of Robert Brown, a copy of C. K. 

 Sprengel's wonderful book, 'Das entdeckte. Geheimniss der 

 Natur.' For some years before 1862 I had specially attended 

 to the fertilisation of our British orchids ; and it seemed to 

 me the best plan to prepare as complete a treatise on this 

 group of plants as well as I could, rather than to utilise the 

 great mass of matter which I had slowly collected with re- 

 spect to other plants. 

 5 



