VICTORY AND REST 159 



seed at all. c So near,' says his able successor, Hermann 

 Miiller, ' was Sprengel to the distinct recognition of the 

 fact that self-fertilisation leads to worse results than 

 cross-fertilisation, and that all the arrangements which 

 favour insect-visits are of value to the plant itself, 

 simply because the insect-visitors effect cross-fertilisa- 

 tion ! ' As in most other anticipatory cases, however, 

 it must be here remarked that Sprengel's idea was 

 wholly teleological : he conceived of nature as animated 

 by a direct informing principle, which deliberately aimed 

 at a particular result ; whereas Darwin rather came to 

 the conclusion that cross-fertilisation as a matter of fact 

 does actually produce beneficial results, and that there- 

 fore those plants which varied most in the direction 

 of arrangements for favouring insect-visits were likely 

 to be exceptionally fortunate in the struggle for exist- 

 ence against competitors otherwise arranged. It is just 

 the usual Darwinian substitution of an efficient for a 

 final cause. 



Even before Sprengel, Kolreuter had recognised, in 

 1761, that self-fertilisation was avoided in nature ; and 

 his observations and experiments on intercrossing and 

 on hybridism were largely relied upon by Darwin him- 

 self, to whom they suggested at an early period many 

 fruitful lines of original investigation. In 1799, again, 

 Andrew Knight, following up the same line of thought 

 in England as Sprengel in Germany, declared as the 

 result of his close experiments upon the garden pea, 

 that no plant ever fertilises itself for a perpetuity ol 

 generations. But Knight's law, not being brought 

 into 'causal connection with any great fundamental 

 principle of nature, was almost entirely overlooked by the 



