THE WELCOMES OF THE FLOWERS 11^ 



lowing victorious title, " The Secrets of Nature in 

 Forms and Fertilization of Flowers Discovered," 

 he presented a vast chronicle of astonishing facts. 

 The previous discoveries of Grew and Linnseus 

 were right so far as they went — viz., " the pollen 

 must reach the stigma" — but those learned au- 

 thorities had missed the true secret of the process. 

 In proof of which Sprengel showed that in a great 

 many flowers, as I have shown at C(Fig. 3), this de- 

 posit of pollen is naturally impossible, owing to the 

 relative position of the floral parts, and that the 

 pollen could not reach the stigma except by artifi- 

 cial aid. He then announced his startling theory: 



1. " Flowers are fertilized by insects." 



2. Insects in approaching the nectar brush the 

 pollen from the anthers with various hairy parts 

 of their bodies, and in their motions convey it to 

 the stigma. 



But Sprengel's seeming victory was doomed to 

 be turned to defeat. The true '' secret " was yet 

 unrevealed in his pages. He had given a poser 

 to Linnaeus (C), yet his own work abounded with 

 similar strange inconsistencies, which, while being 

 scarcely admitted by himself, or ingeniously ex- 

 plained, were nevertheless fatal to the full recog- 

 nition of his wonderful researches. For seventy 

 years his book lay almost unnoticed. 



