VICTORY AND REST 157 



properly thrive. He could watch the butterwort curving 

 round the edges of its wan green foliage upon the 

 captured limbs of fly or aphis. He could note how the 

 serried mass of finger-like processes in the utricles 

 of the bladderwort slowly absorb organic matter 

 from the larva of a gnat, or the minute water-insects 

 entangled within its living and almost animated lobster- 

 pot. He could track the long line of treacherous honey- 

 glands by which the sarracenia entices flies into the 

 festering manure-wells of its sticky pitchers. The 

 minuteness and skill of all his observations on these 

 lesser problems of natural selection inevitably inspired 

 faith among outsiders in the cautious judgment of the 

 observer and experimenter ; and day by day throughout 

 his later years the evidence of the popular acceptance 

 of his doctrine, and of the dying away of the general 

 ridicule with which it was first received by the unlearned 

 public, was very gratifying to the great naturalist. 



A year later, in 1876, came the ' Effects of Cross 

 and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom.' So 

 far as regarded the world of plants, especially with re- 

 spect to its higher divisions, this work was of immense 

 theoretical importance ; and it also cast a wonderful 

 side-light upon the nature of that strange distinction 

 of sex which occurs both in the vegetable and animal 

 kingdom, and in each is the concomitant one might 

 almost say the necessary concomitant of high develop- 

 ment and complex organisation. The great result 

 attained by Darwin in his long and toilsome series of 

 experiments on this interesting subject was the splendid 

 proof of the law that cross-fertilisation produces finer 

 and healthier offspring, while continuous self-fertilisa- 



