No. 507] BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 133 



Curiously, the human mind of the twentieth century 

 does not seem to be superior as a reasoning machine to 

 that of the time of the Greeks, and it is not surprising 

 that the general conclusions of Darwin's philosophy had 

 been reached in one form or another all the way along 

 the past three thousand years. That his name goes into 

 history as their father, results from the way in which he 

 arrived at and substantiated them rather than from their 

 novelty: his greatness in great thought is the natural 

 achievement of a large mind reaching its ends by way of 

 the painstaking study of little things. 



So full a discussion of Darwin from many points of 

 view is provided in the symposium of our fellow society, 

 the American Association for the Advancement of Sci- 

 ence, and in the allotment of subjects for our own Darwin- 

 session, that I should use time to little advantage if I 

 were to go into illustration of this, outside the special field 

 assigned me on the program— to the discussion of which 

 I have been asked to preface this general introduction. 



I wish that I might quote Darwin's first utterance on 

 the subject that has been assigned specially to me for 

 this meeting, but I do not know where to find it. In his 

 autobiography, he states that in 1838 or 1839 he had 

 begun to attend to the cross fertilization of flowers by 

 means of insects, from having come to the conclusion in 

 his speculations on the origin of species, that crossing 

 Played an important part in keeping specific forms con- 

 stant. Even then he had noticed the floral dimorphism 

 of Lin um. In the preface to his book on the fertilization 

 of orchids he explains that its publication resulted from 

 the criticized exclusion (because of lack of space) of 

 detailed facts substantiating an opinion expressed in his 

 work on the origin of species, that it is apparently a uni- 

 versal law of nature that no hermaphrodite fertilizes 

 itself for a perpetuity of generations— a law which he 

 has stated in a variety of other phrases, and the sugges- 

 tion of which he owed to Knight. The introductory 



