Ch. XVI.] FERTILISATION OF FLOWERS. 299 



startling, which seemod to explain them. ... In any one else 

 such an attitude would have produced much work that was 

 crude and rash. But Mr. Darwin — if one may venture on 

 languago which will strike no one who had conversed with 

 him as over-strained — seemed by gentle persuasion to have 

 penetrated that reserve of nature which baffles smaller men. 

 In other words, his long experience had given him a kind of 

 instinctive insight into the method of attack of any biological 

 problem, however unfamiliar to him, while he rigidly controlled 

 the fertility of his mind in hypothetical explanations by the no 

 less fertility of ingeniously devised experiment." 



To form any just idea of the greatness of the revolution 

 worked by my father's researches in the study of the fertilisa- 

 tion of flowers, it is necessary to know from what a condition 

 this branch of knowledge has emerged. It should be remem- 

 bered that it was only during the early years of the present 

 century that the idea of sex, as applied to plants, became firmly 

 established. Sachs, in his History of Botany* (1875), has 

 given some striking illustrations of the remarkable slowness 

 with which its acceptance gained ground. He remarks that 

 when we consider the experimental proofs given by Camerarius 

 (1694), and by Kolreutor (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 re- 

 peatedly crop up. These advorse 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 concep- 

 tion of sex, as applied to plants, had, in fact, 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 f believed (naturally enough in his 

 day) that hermaphrodite J 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. 



* An English edition is published by the Clarendon Press, 1890. 

 t Sachs, Geschichte d. Botanik, p. 419. 



i That is to say, flowers possessing both stamens, or male organs, and 

 pistils or female organs 



