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Floral Biology: Studies on Floral Evolution in Animal-Pollinated Plants. David O. Lloyd and Spencer C. H. Barrett, eds. 410 pp. Chapman & Hall, 1996. $84.95.
This book grew out of a symposium held in Japan in 1993 to commemorate the bicentenary of the publication of Christian Konrad Sprengel's book Das entdeckte Geheimnifs der Natur im Bau in der Befruchtung der Blumen (The Secret of Nature in the Form and Fertilization of Flowers Discovered). Floral Biology does a wonderful job of honoring Sprengel's work in two ways. First, it presents the first English translation (by P Haase) of the introduction to Sprengel's book, accompanied by S. Vogel's interesting historical overview of Sprengel's life and contributions. Second, it provides an introduction to conceptual issues in modern plant reproductive biology, followed by discussions of specific model systems in pollination biology that serve as examples of current research. None of these chapters is simply a review of the literature; all of them present either original data, new models or a current synthesis of a body of previous work.
In his chapter on Sprengel, Vogel comments that there are two kinds of discoveries in science-those that see something no one has seen before and those that see something new about...