OF FLOWERS. 257 



by Camerarius (1694), and by Kolreuter (1761-66), it appears 

 incredible that doubts should afterwards have been raised as 

 to the sexuality of plants. Yet he shows that such doubts 

 did actually repeatedly crop up. These adverse criticisms 

 rested for the most part on careless experiments, but in many 

 cases on a priori arguments. Even as late as 1820, a book of 

 this kind, which would now rank with circle squaring, or flat- 

 earth philosophy, was seriously noticed in a botanical journal. 



A distinct conception of sex as applied to plants had not 

 long emerged from the mists of profitless discussion and 

 feeble experiment, at the time when my father began botany 

 by attending Henslow's lectures at Cambridge. 



When the belief in the sexuality of plants had become 

 established as an incontrovertible piece of knowledge, a 

 weight of misconception remained, weighing down any 

 rational view of the subject. Camerarius * believed (naturally 

 enough in his day) that hermaphrodite flowers are necessarily 

 self-fertilised. He had the wit to be astonished at this, a 

 degree of intelligence which, as Sachs points out, the majority 

 of his successors did not attain to. 



The following extracts from a note-book show that this 

 point occurred to my father as early as 1837 : 



" Do not plants which have male and female organs 

 together [i.e. in the same flower] yet receive influence from 

 other plants ? Does not Lyell give some argument about 

 varieties being difficult to keep [true] on account of pollen 

 from other plants ? Because this may be applied to show all 

 plants do receive intermixture." 



Sprengel, f indeed, understood that the hermaphrodite 

 structure of flowers by no means necessarily leads to self- 

 fertilisation. But although he discovered that in many cases 

 pollen is of necessity carried to the stigma of another flower, 

 he did not understand that in the advantage gained by the 



* Sachs, ' Geschichte,' p. 419. 



t Christian Conrad Sprengel, born 1750, died 1816. 



VOL. III. S 



