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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST 



[Vol. LIII 



considerable period of years had been conducting experi- 

 ments of his own in hybridization, became aware of the 

 ofifer of the Dutch Academy. Thus far, only brief reports 

 of his work had appeared at Tiibingen and Paris. 



On account of the shortness of the time available, 

 Gartner sent to the academy merely a preliminary report 

 of his experiments, accompanied by one hundred and fifty 

 mounted specimen sheets of his different plant hybrids, 

 which elicited a favorable response, and induced the acad- 

 emy to grant an extension of the tim^ for sending in the 

 completed work to December 30, 1836. The interesting 

 resolution of the committee runs in part as follows : 



service of the author be acknowledged. 



The requirements of the committee having been com- 

 piled with, the award was formally conferred on May 20, 

 1837. The thesis appeared in Dutch translation, as a 

 document of 202 pages, in the Proceedings of the Academy 

 for 1838. In 1849, a revised and greatly enlarged edition, 

 ''the fruit of unbroken, zealous, almost twenty-five years' 

 work," was published in German at Stuttgart. 



The writer has found nowhere in current literature any 

 adequate presentation of this seldom read, and little 

 referred-to work, and yet it contains not only much inter- 

 esting information of a concrete nature, but a great deal 

 of speculative philosophical insight in dealing with prob- 

 lems in hybridization, that shows a scientific mind of 

 distinct value. 



Sachs says of the writings of Giirtner (3), "The two works together, 

 are the most thorough and complete account of experimental investiga- 

 tion into sexual relations in plants which had yet been written. They 

 are a brilliant termination of the period of doubt with respect to sexual- 

 ity in plants, which succeeded to the age of Koelreuter." " And thus it 



the foundations of the sexual theory were laid, and the theory itself 

 perfected, so far as it could be, by experiment only, by three of the most 

 eminent of observers, Camerarius of Tubingen, Koelreuter and K. F. 



