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In 1735, it is true, faint premonitions of its present message began to be heard through their first though faltering interpreter, Christian Conrad Sprengel, a German botanist and school-master, who upon one occasion, while looking into the chalice of the wild geranium, received an inspiration which led him to consecrate his life thence-forth to the solution of the floral hieroglyphics.
Sprengel "Gardeners' Chronicle" 1845 page 157, states, that salt and carbonate of lime are liable to mutual decomposition in the soil. We can thus understand the peculiar corroded appearance of the shells on San Lorenzo, and the great decrease of quantity in the carbonate of lime in the powder on the upper ledge.
Such was Sprengel's belief, which he endeavored to substantiate in an exhaustive volume containing the result of his observations pursuant to this theory. But Sprengel had divined but half the truth.
Sprengel, it may be said, was the first to exalt the flower from the mere status of a botanical specimen. This philosophic observer was far in advance of his age, and to his long and arduous researches a basis built upon successively by Andrew Knight, Köhlreuter, Herbert, Darwin, Lubbock, Müller, and others we owe our present divination of the flowers.
Though a few of the more advanced of his followers, among them Andrew Knight , Köhlreuter , Herbert , Gärtner , 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.
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