220 EVOLUTION [Chap. Ill 



Letter 151 you think me impertinent (I am sure I do not mean to be so) 

 if I hazard a remark on the style, which is of more import- 

 ance than some think ? In my opinion (whether or no worth 

 much) your paper would have been much better if written 

 more simply and less elaborated — more like your letters. It 

 is a golden rule always to use, if possible, a short old Saxon 

 word. Such a sentence as " so purely dependent is the 

 incipient plant on the specific morphological tendency" does 

 not sound to my ears like good mother-English — it wants 

 translating. Here and there you might, I think, have con- 

 densed some sentences. I go on the plan of thinking every 

 single word which can be omitted without actual loss of sense 

 as a decided gain. Now perhaps you will think me a meddling 

 intruder : anyhow, it is the advice of an old hackneyed writer 

 who sincerely wishes you well. Your remark on the two 

 sexes counteracting ' variability in product of the one is new 



1 Scott {op. cit., p. 214) : "The reproductive organs of phcenogams, 

 as is well known, are always products of two morphologically distinct 

 organs, the stamens producing the pollen, the carpels producing the 

 ovules. . . . The embryo being in this case the modified resultant of two 

 originally distinct organs, there will necessarily be a greater tendency 

 to efface any individual peculiarities of these than would have been 

 the case had the embryo been the product of a single organ." A 

 different idea seems to have occurred to Mr. Darwin, for in an 

 undated letter to Scott he wrote : " I hardly know what to say on your 

 view of male and female organs and variability. I must think more 

 over it. But I was amused by finding the other day in my portfolio 

 devoted to bud-variation a slip of paper dated June, i860, with some 

 such words as these, ' May not permanence of grafted buds be due to the 

 two sexual elements derived from different parts not having come into 

 play?' I had utterly forgotten, when I read your paper, that any 

 analogous notion had ever passed through my mind — nor can I now 

 remember, but the slip shows me that it had." It is interesting that 

 Huxley also came to a conclusion differing from Scott's; and, 

 curiously enough, Darwin confused the two views, for he wrote to Scott 

 (Dec. 19th) : " By an odd chance, reading last night some short lectures 

 just published by Prof. Huxley, I find your observation, independently 

 arrived at by him, on the confluence of the two sexes causing variability." 

 Professor Huxley's remarks are in his Lectures to Working Men on our 

 Knowledge, etc., No. 4, p. 90 : " And, indeed, I think that a certain 

 amount of variation from the primitive stock is the necessary result of 

 the method of sexual propagation itself ; for inasmuch as the thing pro- 

 pagated proceeds from two organisms of different sexes and different 

 makes and temperaments, and, as the offspring is to be either of one sex 



