My Studio Neighbors

Though a few of the more advanced of his followers, among them Andrew Knight (1799), Koehlreuter (1811), Herbert (1837), Gaertner (1844), clearly recognized the principle and foreshadowed the later theory of cross-fertilization, it was not until the inspired insight of Darwin, as voiced in his "Origin of Species," contemplated these strange facts and inconsistencies of Sprengel that their full significance and actual value were discovered and demonstrated, and his remarkable book, forgotten for seventy years, at last appreciated for its true worth. Alas for the irony of fate! Under Darwin's interpretation the very "defects" which had rendered Sprengel's work a failure now became the absolute witness of a deeper truth which Sprengel had failed to discern. One more short step and he had reached the goal. But this last step was reserved for the later seer. He took the fatal double problem of Sprengel--as shown at E and F, to express the consummation pictorially--and by the simple drawing of a line, as it were, as indicated between G and H, instantly reconciled all the previous perplexities and inconsistencies, thus demonstrating the fundamental plan involved in floral construction to be not merely "insect fertilization," the fatal postulate assumed by Sprengel, but cross-fertilization--a fact which, singularly enough, the latter's own pages proved without his suspicion. Thus we see the four successive steps in progressive knowledge, from Grew in 1682, Linnaeus, 1735, Sprengel, 1787, to Darwin, 1857-1858, and realize with astonishment that it has taken over one hundred and seventy-five years for humanity to learn this apparently simple lesson, which for untold centuries has been noised abroad on the murmuring wings of every bee in the meadow, and demonstrated in almost every flower.