ERRONEOUS DEDUCTION. 195 



methods, furnished cautions, and brought out 

 facts enough to determine the most important 

 directions of investigation. He marked a few 

 plants of each form in his garden, in a field, 

 and in a shady wood, and gathered and weighed 

 the seed. In all the lots the short-styled plants 

 yielded, contrary to his expectation, most seed. 

 He gave tables of results, and added that "by 

 all these standards of comparison the short- 

 styled form is the more fertile." In 1861 he 

 made fuller and fairer trials, and found that 

 the same result also held good for some other 

 species of Primula. " Consequently my anticipa- 

 tion that the plants with longer pistils, rougher 

 stigmas, shorter stamens, and smaller pollen 

 grains would prove to be more feminine in 

 nature, is exactly the reverse of the truth." 



The facts on which his first inference was 

 based were easy to observe; they corroborated 

 each other in a remarkable way, and harmonized 

 perfectly with what was well known concerning 

 dioecious plants. There was no reason to sus- 

 pend judgment, for there were no facts that 

 obtruded themselves as objections to the infer- 

 ence. Now if under such circumstances an 

 inference turns out to be exactly the reverse of 

 the truth, what guaranty is there that a conclu- 

 sion will be correct in any case ? The answer 



