See Lae, Pe FR. ET EE ee Ee NSE gy En En Oo ee Ey ng EMC ete ae nek og 
a rie ght ia he Bid eerie ahs rt 
WN, M. A 
z PP- 352. 
1878.] Recent Literature. II5 
RECENT LITERATURE 
‘ > a 
DarwIin’s DIFFERENT FORMS OF FLOWERS ON PLANTS OF THE 
` SAME SPECIES'—AlII botanists may not become Darwins, but if a 
perusal of this and the other works of their talented author, 
should induce any of the present collectors of local floras, and de- 
scribers of dried plants, to at least devote a moiety of their leisure ` 
to observing flowers, their daily conduct of life, how they grow 
and reproduce their kind, their relation to one another, to insects 
and to the world at large; observations, however, in many cases 
requiring care and patience, as well as some genius, then would in 
time be reareda crop of botanists, who would bridge the chasm now 
yawning between the ordinary herbalist—no farther advanced now, 
perhaps, than in the days of Gerarde—and the author of this book 
and its predecessors. This work, however, interesting as it is, 
was not written for the public, but for the few who have, since 
1862, read the Journal of the Linnean Society, which contains the 
papers forming the body of this book, which are here republished 
in a connected and corrected form, together with some new mat- 
ter, and is now in such an attractive form that few who have read 
Mr. Darwin’s former writings will neglect the present work. 
Premising that, in the words of the author, cleistogamic flowers 
are fertile, minute, completely closed, with the petals rudimentary, 
often with some of the anthers abortive, and the remaining ones 
together with the stigmas much reduced in size; that these flowers 
grow on the same plant with perfect and fully expanded flow- 
ers—we will now let the author give the results of his studies: 
“I will now sum up very briefly the chief conclusions which 
seem to follow from the observations given in this volume. Cleis- 
togamic flowers afford, as just stated, an abundant supply of seeds 
with little expenditure; and we can hardly doubt that they have 
had their structure modified and degraded for this special purpose ; 
perfect flowers being still almost always produced so as to allow 
of occasional cross-fertilization. Hermaphrodite plants have often 
been rendered moncecious, dicecious, ‘or polygamous ; but as the 
separation of the sexes would have been injurious, had not pollen 
been already transported habitually by insects or by the wind from 
flower to flower, we may assume that the process of separation 
did not commence and was not completed for the sake of the ad- 
vantages to be gained from cross-fertilization. The sole motive 
for the separation of the sexes which occurs to me, is that the pro- 
duction of a great number of seeds might become superfluous to 
a plant-under changed conditions of life; and it might then be 
highly beneficial to it that the same flower or the same individual 
_ should not have its vital powers taxed, under the struggle for life 
1 The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the same Species. By CHARLES DAR- 
. F. R. S., with jllustrations. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1877, 12m0., 
> 
