In the final years of the 19th century, the Scottish botanist John Muirhead Macfarlane was uniquely situated to discover, describe, and understand a plant he named Drosera hybrida (Macfarlane 1899). He was classically trained in all the minutia related to structural botany and probably spent a large part of his early life sitting at a microscope. His scientific method was to observe and describe nature, then philosophize about what he discovered.