122 DAEWINIAN INTEKESTS 



say, ' How little these men know of what they write so much 

 about, when their fundamental terms have no definite 

 meaning.' All characters, i.e. all departures from a given 

 structure, are and must be morphological. All originate in 

 the fact that every individual varies from its parents ; and 

 this from being subject to ' the direct and definite action 

 of the conditions of life ' — (an admirable definition ; Weis- 

 mann's is not intelligible to me, if sense at all). 



P. 3 at A. This is very mildly put ; would it not better 

 meet Nageli's objection, which seems to point to histolo- 

 gical characters (and to which and symmetry he probably 

 confines his use of term ' Morphology '), to add ' nor do we 

 know the uses of all the special tissues of any one organ.' 



P. 4 at B. Furthermore, though these arrangements of 

 leaves are reducible to mathematical laws and might hence 

 be presupposed to be the most constant of all the laws of 

 vegetable growth, and to be absolute and irrefragable, they 

 prove not to be so — shewing that even here is variation 

 which no one could call progressive ! capable of transmission 

 and ready for the action of selection. 



To Charles Darwin 



January 18, 1869. 



I do not see either how you can avoid using the term 

 ■ morphological,' but can you not use it without leaving the 

 reader to suppose that it has no definite sense : a very slight 

 modification of what you say when alluding to Nageli's 

 limitation of it would effect this, I think. 



I should not have implied that variations in leaf divergence 

 were transmitted, but that they might be inherited (like 

 any other variation) — but that if such a variation occurs, 

 there is no reason why it should not be transmitted, and if 

 transmitted why N.S. should not determine its prevalence 

 and subsequent constancy in a specific mark. If you have 

 kept my letter, please look and let me know if I have implied 

 more than this. I should extremely like to graft a Chestnut 

 branch if such a variation from the normal leal divergence 

 occurred, and sow the seed [which] a similar branch produced. 



I know no case of ovules differing in position in the 

 different flowers of one plant, except perhaps in monsters. 



