CHARLES DARWIN. 1 1 9 



Darwin was not a systematic botanist, and does not appear to 

 have described a single new species of pbmt. He "looked upon 

 plants as liviiiff things. He did not study their forms so much as 

 their actions. He interrogated them to learn what they were 

 doing. The central truth, towards which his botanical iuvestiga- 

 tiotis constantly tended, was that of the universal activity of the 

 vegetable kingdom— that all plants move and act. He has, so to 

 speak, animated the vegetable world. He has shown that which- 

 ever kingdom of organic nature we contemplate, to live is to move.'''' 

 (Z. F. Ward.) " He made the dry bones live," said Dr. Masters; 

 "he invested plants with a history, a biography, a genealogy, 

 which at once conferred an interest and a dignity on them. 

 Before, they were as the stuffed skin of a beast in the glass 

 case of a museum ; now they are living beings, each in their 

 degree affected by the same circumstances that affect ourselves, 

 and swayed, mutatis mutandis, by like feelings and like passions." 

 Yet he evinced in a very practical manner his interest in systematic 

 botany and his conviction of the importance of an exhaustive 

 synonymic list of the plants of the world, by arranging, a few 

 months before his death, to provide funds for the preparation and 

 publication of a new edition of Steudel's ' Nomenclator ? His 

 original idea has been somewhat modified, and, under Sir Joseph 

 Hooker's supervision, Mr. Daydon Jackson, who edited, for our 

 Society, Pryor's 'Flora of Hertfordshire,' is now carrying out the 

 colossal task of constructing, on the plan of Bentham and Hooker's 

 '■Genera Plantarum,'' a list of all known genera and species of 

 plants, with references. 



The principal purely zoological work of Darwin is his ' Mono- 

 graph of the Cirripedia,' published by the Ray Society, in two 

 volumes of over 1000 pages and 40 plates, in 1851 and 1854. 

 ^0 other group of organisms has had so much light thrown 

 upon it by any one author as the Cirripedia have had in this 

 profound work. The most curious of the many discoveries 

 which Darwin made in examining these animals is that of very 

 minute parasites which he determined to be " complemental 

 males," the name denoting that they do not pair with a female, 

 but with a bisexual individual. He was much struck with 

 the number of diverse beings comprised in some of the species, 

 and by the great diversity in the sexual relations in others. 



In the ' Origin of Species,' the ' Variation of Animals and 

 Plants under Domestication,' and the ' Descent of Man,' are 

 many zoological observations of much importance, irrespective 

 of their bearing on the theory of natural selection ; and our 



