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in part generally presentable in the shape of morphology—are mainly, like the higher mathematics, unintelligible except to those who make them a subject of serious study. They are especially so when presented in Mr. Brown's manner. Perhaps no naturalist ever recorded the results of his investigations in fewer words and with greater precision than Robert Brown: certainly no one ever took more pains to state nothing beyond the precise point in question. Indeed, we have sometimes fancied that he preferred to enwrap rather than to explain his meaning; to put it into such a form that, unless you follow Solomon's injunction and dig for the wisdom as for hid treasure, you may hardly apprehend it until you have found it all out for yourself, when you will have the satisfaction of perceiving that Mr. Brown not only knew all about it, but had put it upon record long before. Very different from this is the way in which Mr. Darwin takes his readers into his confidence, freely displays to them the sources of his information and the working of his mind, and even shares with them all his doubts and misgivings, while in a clear and full exposition he sets forth the reasons which have guided him to his conclusions. These you may hesitate or decline to adopt, but you feel sure that they have been presented with perfect fairness; and, if you think of arguments against them, you may be confident that they have all been duly considered before.
The sagacity which characterizes these two naturalists is seen in their success in finding decisive instances, and in their sure insight into the meaning of things. As an instance of the latter on Mr. Darwin's part, and a justification of our venture to compare him with the facile princeps botanicorum, we will, in conclusion, allude to the single instance in which they took the same subject in hand. In his papers on the organs and modes of fecundation in Orchideæ and Asclepiadeæ, Mr. Brown refers more than once to C. K. Sprengel's almost forgotten work, shows how the structure of the flowers in these orders largely requires the agency of insects for their fecundation, and is aware that "in Asclepiadeæ... the insect so readily passes from one corolla to another that it not unfrequently visits every flower of the umbel." He must also have contemplated the transport of pollen from plant to plant by wind and insects, and we know from another source that he looked upon Sprengel's ideas as far from fantastic. Yet, instead of taking the single forward step which now seems so obvious, he even hazarded the conjecture that the insect-forais of some Orchideous flowers are intended to deter rather than to attract insects. And so the explanation of all these and other extraordinary structures, as well as of the arrangement of blossoms in general, and even the very meaning and need of sexual propagation, were left to be supplied by Mr. Darwin. The aphorism "Nature abhors a vacuum" is a characteristic specimen of the Science of the middle ages. The aphorism "Nature abhors close fertilization," and the demonstration of the principle,
