2 Flowers and their Unbidden Guests. 



facts our main objecty should institute new experiments 

 which may place the theory on a firmer hasis, and 

 should so solve the questions at issue by the experi- 

 mental method. It cannot be denied that the founda- 

 tions on which the theory at present rests were for 

 the most part built up and obtained without known 

 aim or purpose ; that they consist of observations 

 which were the result of accident rather than of 

 definite intention, and which consequently present all 

 the deficiencies which cling to chance or almost chance 

 observations. The foundations, in short, are not such 

 as can be relied on with perfect confidence, since most 

 of the older observations leave room for doubt whether 

 the observer even saw correctly, or whether, misled by 

 some favourite hypothesis, he did not put down as an 

 actual fact what was in reality no more than a con- 

 jecture. The records, at any rate, of botanical literature 

 are vitiated by a larger intermixture of falsity and 

 fiction than any one would have thought possible in an 

 experimental science. Observers have been eager to 

 make their conclusions harmonise with the systematic 

 descriptions and artificial separations of species to be 

 found until quite recently, nay, even in the present 

 day, in the leading phytographical works ; and one 

 finds in consequence the most absurd statements set 

 forth as " experimental results." Authors, who had 

 neither the opportunity, nor moreover the requisite 

 patience and determination, to test by experiment the 



