Religious Reticence. 147 



Plants." Early in i860, while on one of his rare 

 vacation trips at Hartfield, he observed the insects 

 which had been caught by the leaves of the little 

 Drosera. The subject so interested and attracted 

 him that he carried some of the plants home, hoping 

 to learn more of them. The idea which he con- 

 ceived was that possibly the insects were caught for 

 some special purpose. For a period covering six- 

 teen years he studied these and other plants, making 

 a series of experiments wonderful in their detail. 

 The plants were fed with food of various kinds and 

 facts elicited of a most surprising nature, not the 

 least of which was that a plant could secrete, when 

 properly excited, a fluid containing an acid and fer- 

 ment closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an 

 animal. 



In 1876 "The Effect of Cross- and Self-Fertilisa- 

 tion in the Vegetable Kingdom " was published, and 

 in 1880 "The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants 

 of the Same Species." This was followed by a life 

 of Erasmus Darwin, a translation from the German 

 of Krause, in 1879, " The Power of Movement in 

 Plants," and finally, in 1 881, he published the work 

 previously referred to, " The Formation of Vegeta- 

 ble Mould through the Action of Worms," that was 

 the outcome of the paper read forty years previous 

 before the Linnaean Society, comprising, as we have 

 seen, experiments which entailed a wait of twenty 

 years before the exact result desired could be deter- 

 mined. This was the last great work of the naturalist. 



In Darwin's works there is rarely any reference to 

 religion ; this was due to several reasons, one being 

 that he desired not to hurt the feelings of any reader 



