PHYTOGAMY. 243 



in this great order, cross-fertilization must be all but universal 

 as between different flowers of the same plant, and commonly 

 between different individual plants. 



In both these kinds of hermaphrodite flowers the practical 

 separation of the sexes is hardly less than in Oaks, Willows, 

 and other trees and herbs, in which the stamens and pistils 

 occupy distinct plants or different blossoms. To these three 

 classes, then, Mr. Charles Darwin's aphorism, " Nature abhors 

 perpetual self-fertilization," undoubtedly applies. But there 

 remains an equal number of plants with hermaphrodite blos- 

 soms, all alike, with no obvious obstacle to fertilization with 

 their own pollen, while in many the adaptations are such as 

 must apparently insure it, and indeed does very commonly 

 insure it. Wherefore it is nowise surprising that self-fertili- 

 zation was the orthodox doctrine — that there was thought to 

 be a general adaptation for the falling of the pollen upon the 

 stigmas of the same blossom. It is true that Christian Con- 

 rad Sprengel taught the contrary, in his work entitled " The 

 Secret of Nature Discovered," published eighty-five years ago, 

 and that he — mainly upon good observations — in a measure 

 anticipated Mr. Darwin's aphorism; but he was accounted 

 whimsical and untrustworthy by his own generation, and was 

 forgotten by the next. Not so the contemporary " Loves of 

 the Plants" — the hymnal of the old orthodox cult — which 

 sings the — 



" Gay hopes and amorous sorrows of the mead," 



in verse which our fathers were fond of, but from which we 

 will not further quote. Had Dr. Erasmus Darwin known 

 Sprengel's book, and brought to it the insight of the grand- 

 son, how different and how much richer the poem might have 

 been. What curious facts and teeming fancies have been left 

 unsmig ! 



To H. Miiller and to Hildebrand, two of Sprengel's coun- 

 trymen, in our own day, may be credited the confirmation of 

 the latter's thesis as respects the general run of hermaphrodite 

 flowers ; and this by showing what a large proportion even 

 of these are functionally unisexual, either by the shedding of 



