Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/448

428 Schleiden and Schacht on the one side and by Hofmeister on the other respecting the processes in the formation of the embryo.

Gartner's writings derive their importance not so much from new and surprising discoveries or brilliant ideas and unexpected combinations, as from their very searching examination into all the circumstances and relations which can come under consideration in the sexual propagation of Phanerogams. His experiments in hybridisation, of which he kept most exact accounts, exceeded the number of nine thousand ; in these and in normal cases of pollination he studied all the sources of error which could in any way affect his experiments, and took into careful consideration all the conditions of fertilisation connected with the development of the plant itself and with its external circumstances; at the same time he examined critically all that had been written on the subject, and submitted every experiment reported by former observers to the test of his own wide experience. The volume on self-fertilisation is a complete account of the biology and physiology of flowers. The phenomena connected with the unfolding and fertilisation of the flower are described from the writer's own observations, some of which are quite new; it specially investigates the relations between the calyx, the corolla, the secretion of nectar and the opening of the anthers, also the temperature of flowers and the physiological processes in the ovary, the style and the stigma; all that was then known of irritability and the phenomena of movement in the flower and in the organs of fructification was collected together and elucidated by fresh observations, and thus a picture was drawn complete to the smallest detail of the life of a flower, such as we do not yet possess of any other organ. It would be idle to think of giving in a small compass a clear idea of the wealth of these observations. But all this was only preliminary to the main point, the proof that Camerarius was right, that notwithstanding the objections of a hundred years