My Studio Neighbors

But Sprengel had divined but half the truth. The insect was necessary, it was true, but the Sprengel idea was concerned only with the individual flower, and the great botanist was soon perplexed and confounded by an opposing array of facts which completely destroyed the authority of his work--facts which showed conclusively that the insect could not thus convey the pollen as described, because the stigma in the flower was either not yet ready to receive it--perhaps tightly closed against it--or was past its receptive period, even decidedly withered. This radical assumption of fertilization in the individual flower, which lay at the base of Sprengel's theory, thus so completely exposed as false, discredited his entire work. The good was condemned with the bad, and the noble volume was lost in comparative oblivion--only to be finally resurrected and its full value and significance revealed by the keen scientific insight of Darwin (1859). From the new stand-point of evolution through natural selection the facts in Sprengel's work took on a most important significance. Darwin now reaffirmed the Sprengel theory so far as the necessity of the insect was concerned, but showed that all those perplexing floral conditions which had disproved Sprengel's assumption, instead of having for their object the conveying of pollen to the stigma of the same flower, implied its transfer to the stigma of another, cross-fertilization being the evident design, or evolved and perpetuated advantage. This solution was made logical and tenable only on the assumption that such evolved conditions, insuring cross-fertilization, were of distinct advantage to the flower in the competitive struggle for existence, and that all cross-fertilized flowers were thus the final result of natural selection.