My Studio Neighbors

1. "Flowers are fertilized by insects." 2. Insects in approaching the nectar brush the pollen from the anthers with various hairy parts of their bodies, and in their motions convey it to the stigma. But Sprengel's seeming victory was doomed to be turned to defeat. The true "secret" was yet unrevealed in his pages. He had given a poser to Linnaeus (C), yet his own work abounded with similar strange inconsistencies, which, while being scarcely admitted by himself, or ingeniously explained, were nevertheless fatal to the full recognition of his wonderful researches. For seventy years his book lay almost unnoticed. "Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth." The defects in Sprengel's work were, after all, not actual defects. The error lay simply in his interpretation of his carefully noted facts. As Hermann Mueller has said, "Sprengel's investigations afford an example of how even work that is rich in acute observation and happy interpretation may remain inoperative if the idea at its foundation is defective." What, then, was the flaw in Sprengel's work? Simply that he had seen but half the "secret" which he claimed to have "discovered." Starting to prove that insects fertilize the flowers, his carefully observed facts only served to demonstrate in many cases the reverse--that insects could not fertilize flowers in the manner he had declared. He was met at every hand, for instance, by floral problems such as are shown at E and F, where the pollen and the stigma in the same flower matured at different periods; and even though he recognized and admitted that the pollen must in many cases be transferred from one flower to another, he failed to divine that such was actually the common vital plan involved. It may readily be imagined that his great work precipitated an intense and prolonged controversy, and incited emulous investigation by the botanists of his time.