494 THE MAKING OF THE ' ORIGIN ' 



believe you are afraid to send me a ripe Edwardsia pod for 

 fear I should float it from New Zealand to Chile ! ' 1 And so 

 he quickly routs Hooker's cautious scepticism. The latter, 

 confident that nothing will happen, has planted some seeds 

 that the Gulf Stream has carried across the Atlantic to the 

 coast of Norway. They germinate perfectly, and in answer 

 to his confession of defeat (the letter is not extant), Darwin 

 writes (June 1, 1856) : 



I read your note as far as * unutterable mortification ' 

 and was in despair, for I came instantly to the conclusion 

 that probably Government had determined to give up Kew 

 Gardens ! and you may imagine how I laughed when I came 

 to the real cause of mortification. It is the funniest thing in 

 the world that you do not rejoice ; for you have (as I never 

 have) put in print that you do not believe in multiple crea- 

 tion, and therefore you surely should rejoice at every conceiv- 

 able means of dispersal. Well, I and my wife have enjoyed 

 a jolly laugh, and all the more from fully believing for a 

 second that some great calamity had befallen you. 



To quote a few more of the points with which the letters 

 teem : Does the evidence show that in plants as in animals 

 variability increases in parts which are abnormally developed ? 

 Do experiments in the Kew greenhouses show that cross 

 fertilisation improves the fertility of the plant ? Do statistics 

 indicate that trees, where the abundance of adjacent blossom 

 would tend to self-fertilisation, counteract this tendency by 

 being more often dioecious than other plants ? What of 

 hybridism in botany ; or of the part played by insects in 

 fertilisation ? On what definition does a botanist rank a class 

 of plants as high or low in the scale, and how is competitive 

 highness measured, i.e. that superiority in development which 

 enables, say, the recent forms of Europe and Asia to oust 

 Australian forms when they meet, especially as some par- 

 ticular adaptations in a ' high ' class represent a retrogression 

 according to the usual standard, which measures ' highness ' 



1 The plant is only found in these two countries. It was shown that legu- 

 minous seeds as a rule were destroyed by immersion, thus suggesting a reason 

 for the peculiarities in the distribution of the Leguminosae. 



