Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/440

make it a reproach to the discoverer of such remarkable and widely-prevalent phenomena in nature, that he did not answer this question and give the final touches to the body of doctrine which he created, and which could only be developed by many experiments and the labour of long years? Neither his worldly circumstances nor the reception accorded to his work with all its genius were such as to encourage him to undertake the solution of this last and most difficult problem, even if he had been inclined to do so. Botanists were just at that time and for some time after preoccupied with views, which allowed such biological and physiological facts in vegetable life to lie neglected, nor were Sprengel's results at all favourable to the doctrine of the constancy of species ; from that point of view the wonderful relations between the organisation of flowers and that of insects must have seemed absurd and repulsive. In such cases it is the character of less-gifted natures, rather to deny the facts or to disregard them, than to sacrifice their own favourite views to them; this is one explanation of the neglect which Sprengel's book met with everywhere. Then notwithstanding the labours of a Camerarius and a Koelreuter there were many even at the beginning of our own century who still doubted the sexuality of plants. Even after Knight and William Herbert, with a right understanding of the question left open by Sprengel, had obtained experimental results which helped to answer it, the new doctrine did not make its way. The earlier simple-minded but consistent teleology had been succeeded by a rejection of all teleological explanations in the treatment of physiological questions, and this spirit conduced to make Sprengel's results seem inconvenient in proportion as they appeared to admit only of such explanation. With regard to phenomena of this kind botanists before 1860 were in a position, in which they were without the means of forming a judgment; they shrank from the teleological point of view and from believing with Konrad Sprengel, that every, even the least-obvious, arrangement in an organism was the