Y BOTANICAL CLUB. 
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AUTHORS: PREFACE 
TWENTY-FIVE years have passed since the appearance of Hermann 
Miiller’s admirable book on ‘The Fertilisation of Flowers by Insects and 
their Reciprocal Adaptations!.’ It has long been out of print, and it 
seemed to me to be worthy of republication with notes, like the funda- 
mental work of Christian Konrad Sprengel: Das entdeckte Geheimnis der 
Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen (Berlin, 1793), which 
I brought out some years ago in Ostwald’s Klassiker der exakten Natur- 
wissenschaften (vols. xlviii-li)*. The further, however, I entered into the. 
subject, the more I became convinced that the observations of later 
investigators, following in the steps of Miiller during the last two decades, 
and developing this branch of botany in a remarkable manner, have given 
us such abundance of new material that the necessary notes and additions 
would considerably exceed the original contents of Miiller’s book. I accord- 
ingly resolved to write an entirely new work, founded upon Hermann 
Miiller’s ‘ Fertilisation of Flowers by Insects,’ after satisfactory arrangements 
had been made with his representatives. 
The fruitfulness of the investigations made during the last two decades 
on the relations between the structure and environment of flowers, and 
the widening of the circle of those who take an active part in these 
investigations, have added to the difficulty of the task of collating the 
enormous quantity of available material. To accomplish this it was 
necessary to devote three years of uninterrupted labour, during which there 
appeared numerous, and in part extremely important, new publications on 
Flower Pollination, which had to be taken into consideration. Literary 
activity, however, quite unlike scientific investigation, demands a conclusion, 
and therefore it seemed to me inexpedient to delay any longer the 
publication of the work. The memoirs that appeared on the subject 
during the printing of my work were considered as far as possible, 
especially when they afforded a solution of contradictions occurring in 
the statements of different observers in regard to the same flower. During 
the whole time spent in writing this work, I have been constantly engaged 
1 ‘Die Befruchtung der Blumen durch Insekten und die gegenseitigen Anpassungen beider, 
Leipzig, 1873, Wilhelm Engelmann. English Translation by D’Arcy W. Thompson, 1883. 
? Leipzig, 1894, Wilhelm Engelmann. 
