302 BOTANY [Chap. X 



Letter 630 I have got seeds from Dr. King of some Melastomacese, 

 and will write to Veitch to see if I can get the Melastomaceous 

 genera Monochcetum and Heterocentron or some such name, 

 on which I before experimented. Now, if you can aid me, 

 I know that you will ; but if you cannot, do not write and 

 trouble yourself. 



III.— Correspondence with John Scott, 1862— 1871. 



",If he had leisure he would make a wonderful observer, 

 to my judgment ; I have come across no one like him." — 

 Letter to J. D. Hooker, May 29th [1863]. 



The following group of letters to John Scott, of whom some account 

 is given in Vol. I. (pp. 217 et seq.) deal chiefly with experimental work in 

 the fertilisation of flowers. In addition to their scientific importance, 

 several of the letters are of special interest as illustrating the encourage- 

 ment and friendly assistance which Darwin gave to his correspondent. 

 After obtaining a post in the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, Scott continued 

 to work and to correspond with Darwin, but his work was hardly on a 

 level with the promise of his earlier years. According to the Journal 

 of Botany, he was attacked by an affection of the spleen at Darjeeling, 

 where he had been sent to report on the coffee disease. He returned 

 to Edinburgh in the spring of 1880, and died in the June of that year. 



Letter 631 John Scott l to C. Darwin. 



Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, Nov. nth, 1862. 



I take the liberty of addressing you for the purpose of 

 directing your attention to an error in one of your ingenious 

 explanations of the structural adaptations of the Orchidaceae 

 in your late work. This occurs in the genus Acropera, two 

 species of which you assume to be unisexual, and so far as 

 known represented by male individuals only. Theoretically 

 you have no doubt assigned good grounds for this view ; 

 nevertheless, experimental observations that I am now making 

 have already convinced me of its fallacy. And I thus hur- 

 riedly, and as you may think prematurely, direct your 

 attention to it, before I have seen the final result of my 

 own experiment, that you might have the longer time for 

 reconsidering the structure of this genus for another edition 

 of your interesting book, if indeed it be not already called 



1 For biographical note see Vol. I., pp. 217, 218. 



