112 THE METHOD OF DARWIN. 



tions, and of the patience with which he made 

 experiments to prove things which to others 

 would seem so simple and self-evident as to 

 need no proof. Like his great contemporary, 

 Faraday, he " could trust a fact, and always 

 cross-examined an assertion." It was his con- 

 scientious verification of even his smallest 

 inductions that gave the scientific world its 

 great confidence in his work. 



Darwin's greatest induction has yet to be con- 

 sidered, and will be discussed at some length ; 

 because, as well as being his greatest induc- 

 tion, it is his most notable speculative failure, 

 and will give an opportunity to study the char- 

 acteristics of false and true hypotheses. The 

 problem of inheritance, the transmission of 

 qualities from parent to offspring, had weighed 

 upon him during all the years of his work on 

 the theories of descent and natural selection. 

 Almost at the very start we find him making 

 experiments on beds of self- and cross-fertilized 

 plants to determine questions of inheritance. 

 These experiments possess their greatest inter- 

 est, not from having furnished any important 

 data for the solution of the problem of inherit- 

 ance, but from having finally impressed him 

 with the importance of cross-fertilization in 

 the plant kingdom. They show how early he 



