INTRODUCTION xxv 



It seems strange to realise that the facts that are taught 

 in every school in the country should have been, until 

 fifty years ago, a mystery for sages to speculate upon. 



It took two hundred years to comprehend the truths that 

 were every day being demonstrated by the flovs^ers of the 

 field. In 1682 Nehemias Grew announced that the pollen 

 of a flower must reach the stigma before it could be fer- 

 tilised (Plate I., Fig. 2). Linnaeus settled the arguments 

 which for fifty years waxed hot over the subject, by proving 

 that it was the pollen that really set the seed of a flower. 

 Thus the functions of the stamens and pistils were satis- 

 factorily disposed of; but nothing was settled concerning the 

 honey, the perfume and the colour of the flower. It was 

 considered quite sufficient to consider that the Creator had 

 made them for the delight of man. 



But certain curious spirits speculated on the matter, until 

 the day when Sprengel discovered his great half truth. 

 He found that some flowers were so arranged that the pollen 

 could not possibly fall upon the stigma of the same blossom. 

 In some cases the stamens were much shorter than the 

 stigma, as in Plate I., Fig. 3. Therefore he concluded that 

 the insects that were continually crawling in and out of the 

 blossoms made up to the plant for what seemed to him a 

 natural defect in structure, by transferring the pollen to the 

 stigma of the same flower. It never occurred to him that 

 there was a divine and beneficent reason for preventing the 

 pollen from falling on the stigma of its own flower. The 

 point he tried to prove was everywhere disproved by the 



