420 History of the Sexual Theory. [book hi. 



make it a reproach to the discoverer of such remarkable and 

 widely-prevalent phenomena in nature, that he did not answer 

 this question and give the final touches to the body of doctrine 

 which he created, and which could only be developed by 

 many experiments and the labour of long years ? Neither his 

 worldly circumstances nor the reception accorded to his work 

 with all its genius were such as to encourage him to undertake 

 the solution of this last and most difficult problem, even if he 

 had been inclined to do so. Botanists were just at that time 

 and for some time after preoccupied with views, which allowed 

 such biological and physiological facts in vegetable life to lie 

 neglected, nor were Sprengel's results at all favourable to the 

 doctrine of the constancy of species ; from that point of view 

 the wonderful relations between the organisation of flowers 

 and that of insects must have seemed absurd and repulsive. 

 In such cases it is the character of less-gifted natures, rather 

 to deny the facts or to disregard them, than to sacrifice their 

 own favourite views to them ; this is one explanation of the 

 neglect which Sprengel's book met with everywhere. Then 

 notwithstanding the labours of a Camerarius and a Koelreuter 

 there were many even at the beginning of our own century 

 who still doubted the sexuality of plants. Even after Knight 

 and William Herbert, with a right understanding of the ques- 

 tion left open by Sprengel, had obtained experimental results 

 which helped to answer it, the new doctrine did not make its 

 way. The earlier simple-minded but consistent teleology had 

 been succeeded by a rejection of all teleological explanations 

 in the treatment of physiological questions, and this spirit 

 conduced to make Sprengel's results seem inconvenient in 

 proportion as they appeared to admit only of such explanation. 

 With regard to phenomena of this kind botanists before i860 

 were in a position, in which they were without the means of 

 forming a judgment ; they shrank from the teleological point 

 of view and from believing with Konrad Sprengel, that every, 

 even the least-obvious, arrangement in an organism was the 



