No. 507] BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 139 



effective bar to really understanding their structure"; 

 sexual differences may ' ' characterize and keep separate 

 the coexisting individuals of the same species in the same 

 manner as they characterize and have kept separate those 

 groups of individuals, produced from common parents 

 during the lapse of ages or in different regions, which 

 we rank and denominate as distinct species"; "Illegiti- 

 mate unions [in heterogonous plants] are hybrids formed 

 within the limits of one and the same species." 



Through it all, too, runs a thread of similar sentences 

 revealing the soul of the man, groping only after the 

 truth, to whom "the whole subject is as yet hidden in 

 darkness." In this spirit he lived, worked and wrote. 

 Quite apart from success in accomplishing the direct 

 purpose for which he worked, he succeeded to an excep- 

 tional degree in stimulating the research instinct in 

 others, and directing it into attractive and prolific fields, 

 seeing realized almost immediately his prediction that 

 what had been held for trivialities might, when under- 

 stood, "exalt the whole vegetable kingdom in most per- 

 sons' estimation." 



Things did not always go in his work as they were 

 expected to— his first belief that if every bee in Britain 

 were destroyed there would be no more pods on the kid- 

 ney beans in that country, gave place to the certainty 

 that a small percentage of fruit may set without such aid, 

 and this particular species afterwards gave him less than 

 the customary evidence of the benefits of crossing; but 

 in general his expectation was sustained, or gave place 

 to a better result for his general needs, and incidentally 

 provided a wealth of detail consonant with his evolu- 

 tionary theories and not yet known to be explicable on 

 other grounds. Aside from this participation in his 

 broader achievements, his work on floral ecology and 

 fertilization, as has been said, has furnished one of the 

 greatest stimuli of modern times to purposeful coordi- 

 nated observation of minutiaj, not one of which is mean- 

 ingless—in a field open to all who can see, whether or 



