300 OBITUARY X 



appearing at first sight very complex, that I pro- 

 cured various other kinds of climbing plants 

 and studied the whole subject. . . . Some of the 

 adaptations displayed by climbing plants are as 

 beautiful as those of orchids for ensuring cross- 

 fertilisation." (I, p. 93.) 



In the midst of all this amount of work, 

 remarkable alike for its variety and its importance, 

 among plants, the animal kingdom was by no 

 means neglected. A large moiety of "The 

 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domesti- 

 cation" (1868), which contains the pieces justifica- 

 tives of the first chapter of the " Origin," is devoted 

 to domestic animals, and the hypothesis of 

 " pangenesis " propounded in the second volume 

 applies to the whole living world. In the " Ori- 

 gin" Darwin throws out some suggestions as to 

 the causes of variation, but he takes heredity, as it 

 is manifested by individual organisms, for granted, 

 as an ultimate fact ; pangenesis is an attempt to 

 account for the phenomena of heredity in the 

 organism, on the assumption that the physiological 

 units of which the organism is composed give off 

 gemmules, which, in virtue of heredity, tend to 

 reproduce the unit from which they are derived. 



That Darwin had the application of his theory 

 to the origin of the human species clearly in his 

 mind in 1859, is obvious from a passage in the 

 first edition of " The Origin of Species." (Ed. I, 

 p. 488.) " In the distant future I see open fields 



