CHAPTER XXII 



MISCELLANEOUS, 1850-1860 



SEVERAL letters bear on his methods of work and illustrate 

 his tendency to bring anomalies under established principles 

 instead of inventing new principles to suit the exception ; 

 his passion to verify things for himself ; his critical frankness 

 in dealing with ill-founded ideas combined with readiness 

 to accept well-founded criticism. Others are of personal 

 interest. 



Kew : Wednesday, Sept. 20, 1854. 



DEAR BENTHAM, I have just been examining a mon- 

 strous Stachys sylvatica with a long 4-lobed ovary consist- 

 ing of 2 fore and aft carpels, i.e. one carpel with its back 

 to axis and 4 parietal ovules in pairs at the sutures, thus 

 (diagram). 



I think this reduces your Labiatae to the ordinary type 

 of carpellary structure. Was it not you ? who once quoted 

 Labiatae to me as opposed to Brown's marginal carpellary 

 theory of origin of ovules ? 



I am a far better Tory than you are and like laws. I 

 on principle object to nature having one law for carpellary 

 produced ovules and another for free central ones. I would 

 rather go the whole hog and call all placentation axial and 

 all ovules produced on the axis, or adnate portions of it, 

 or branched adnate portions of it, running along edges of 

 carpellary leaves, than to hold to one law for the majority 

 of plants and take another for the exceptions. In Botany 

 there are no end to the * morphological differentiations ' 

 (as Von Baer calls them in Zoology) which result in the 

 most complete congenital obliteration of all traces of original 



VOL. I 421 2 E 



