94 NOTES AND COMMENTS [AUGUST 
then his ready grasp of difficult problems, and lastly, the power of 
turning to account the waste observations, failures, and even the 
blunders of his predecessors in whatever subject of inquiry.” As is 
well known, Darwin was wont to attribute his success to industry 
rather than to ability. “It is dogged that does it” was an expression 
he often made use of. He attributed his results to “ the love of science 
—unbounded patience in long reflecting over many subjects—industry 
in observing facts, and a fair share of invention as well as of common 
sense.” This is a famously modest self-estimate, but its psychological 
justice may be doubted, and it seems to us important to notice Sir 
Joseph Hooker’s opinion. “In this retrospect he has, if my judgment 
is correct, greatly undervalued invention, that is originality or that 
outcome of the exercise of the imagination which is so conspicuous in 
every experiment he made or controlled, or in the genesis of every 
new fact or idea that he first brought to light.” ‘Truly it was fell 
doggedness. 
Dispersal of Seeds. 
AMONG many interesting notes in Mr. Clement Reid’s “ Origin of the 
British Flora” is a table of modes of dispersal of seeds, which may be 
quoted as follows :—Minute seeds readily moved by accidents of all 
sorts; those eaten or dropped by birds, most of which are destroyed 
while some remain uninjured; seeds passed in an uninjured state by 
mammals or birds; those transported by wind; those which cling to 
feathers or fur (e.g. in the cakes of mud which adhere to the flanks of 
oxen); those transported by water; those plants of which broken 
pieces grow, such fragments being carried on the legs of wading birds 
often to great distances. With regard to the transportation by water 
an interesting observation has reached us from Mull and Iona. It is 
said that thousands of apple seeds have taken root on those islands, 
the result of dispersal from the wrecked liner “ Labrador.” Mr. Reid 
mentions an interesting case of a dead wood-pigeon found by him in a 
chalk pit; its crop was full of broad-beans, all of which were growing 
well, though under ordinary circumstances they would have been 
eventually digested. As he says—“ A pigeon would easily cross the 
Strait of Dover in half an hour, and in the days when raptorial birds 
and wild cats were plentiful many pigeons must have been struck 
down with their last meal undigested.” 
Reformed Nomenclature ! 
Pror. HERRERA emphasizes the impossibility of recognising organisms 
by their names under the present complicated system of nomenclature 
