56 GROWTH OF THE 'ORIGIN.' [ I S 5 5. 



you could not have taken a better line, in my opinion ; but as 

 for showing your satisfaction in confounding my experiments > 

 I assure you I am quite enough confounded those horrid 

 seeds, which, as you truly observe, if they sink they won't 

 float. 



I have written to Scoresby and have had a rather dry 

 answer, but very much to the purpose, and giving me no 

 hopes of any law unknown to me which might arrest their 

 everlasting descent into the deepest depths of the ocean. By 

 the way it was very odd, but I talked to Col. Sabine for half 

 an hour on the subject, and could not make him see with 

 respect to transportal the difficulty of the sinking question ! 

 The bore is, if the confounded seeds will sink, I have been 

 taking all this trouble in salting the ungrateful rascals for 

 nothing. 



Everything has been going wrong with me lately ; the fish 

 at the Zoolog. Soc. ate up lots of soaked seeds, and in 

 imagination they had in my mind been swallowed, fish and 

 all, by a heron, had been carried a hundred miles, been 

 voided on the banks of some other lake and germinated 

 splendidly, when lo and behold, the fish ejected vehemently,, 

 and with disgust equal to my own, all the seeds from their 

 mouths.* 



But I am not going to give up the floating yet : in first 

 place I must try fresh seeds, though of course it seems far 

 more probable that they will sink ; and secondly, as a last 

 resource, I must believe in the pod or even whole plant or 

 branch being washed into the sea ; with floods and slips and 



* In describing these troubles to " I find fish will greedily eat seeds 

 Mr. Fox, my father wrote : " All of aquatic grasses, and that millet- 

 nature is perverse and will not do seed put into fish and given to a 

 as I wish it ; and just at present I stork, and then voided, will germi- 

 wish I had my old barnacles to nate. So this is the nursery rhyme- 1 

 work at, and nothing new." The of ' this is the stick that beats the 

 experiment ultimately succeeded, pig,' &c. &c." 

 and he wrote to Sir J. Hooker : 



