PUBLICATIONS. 



71 



praised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest 

 comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that " I have 

 worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do 

 more than this." I remember when in Good Success Bay, 

 in Tierra del Fuego, thinking (and, I believe, that I wrote 

 home to the effect) that I could not employ my life better 

 than in adding a little to Natural Science. This I have done 

 to the best of my abilities, and critics may say what they like, 

 but they cannot destroy this conviction. 



During the two last months of 1859 I was fully occupied 

 in preparing a second edition of the * Origin,' and by an 

 enormous correspondence. On January ist, i860, I began 

 arranging my notes for my work on the * Variation of Ani- 

 mals and Plants under Domestication; ' but it was not pub- 

 lished until the beginning of 1868 ; the delay having been 

 caused partly by frequent illnesses, one of which lasted seven 

 months, and partly by being tempted to publish on other sub- 

 jects which at the time interested me more. 



On May 15th, 1862, my little book on the ' Fertilisation of 

 Orchids,' which cost me ten months' work, was published : 

 most of the facts had been slowly accumulated during several 

 previous years. During the summer of 1839, and, I believe, 

 during the previous summer, I was led to attend to the cross- 

 fertilisation of flowers by the aid of insects, from having come 

 to the conclusion in my speculations on the origin of species, 

 that crossing played an important part in keeping specific 

 forms constant. I attended to the subject more or less dur- 

 ing every subsequent summer ; and my interest in it was 

 greatly enhanced by having procured and read in November 

 1 841, through the advice of Robert Brown, a copy of C. K. 

 Sprengel's wonderful book, * Das entdeckte Geheimniss der 

 Natur.* For some years before 1862 I had specially attended 

 to the fertilisation of our British orchids ; and it seemed to 

 me the best plan to prepare as complete a treatise on this 

 group of plants as well as I could, rather than to utilise the 

 great mass of matter which I had slowly collected with re- 

 spect to other plants. 

 5 



