1900 | OPEN LETTERS 205 
experimental beds, the provision of any unusual apparatus or materials, and 
so on.—JOHN C. WILLIS, Director Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya, 
Ceylon. 
PATTERN FLOWERS AND METAMORPHOSIS. 
C.R. B., in reviewing my text-book on p. 69 of the January GAZETTE, 
asks : 
Why assure a student that “a flower will obey certain well-defined laws,” when 
the bulk of the chapters on the flower are concerned with explaining how they “ dis- 
obey” these “laws,” and in defining terms that are used to describe departures from a 
purely imaginative pattern? The whole treatment of the flower, indeed, proceeds 
upon the pernicious theory of metamorphos 
Since the question has been es I trust that you will allow me to 
answer it, and in my own wa 
critic’s quotation falsifies me, in sense as well as in word, and this fal- 
sification furnishes the only basis for his question. The statement is: “ The 
typical flower will ogee certain well-defined laws of structure as regards the 
following characters : It may be wrong, but it at least allows its author the. 
defense of reason, which is denied him by the misquotation. That statement 
was written in the light of an individual acquaintance with hundreds of such 
typical flowers, which the critic says are “ purely imaginary.” Since there 
are scores of thousands which vary from the pattern, the proportion of pages 
devoted to classifying such variations was considered appropriate. Is it not 
proceeding ex cathedra to call the theory of metamorphosis “ pernicious ”’ ? 
May we not be credited with at least a knowledge of the attempts which have 
been made to get away from it, and a personal conclusion that that course 
leaves us no working basis which does not fail at the first test ? To me the 
reading of Engler and Prantl’s Pfanzenfamilien, and the actual study of the 
reat number of flowers which I have examined during the last ten years is 
more convincing than any of the speculative “thought” or unproved theo- 
ries which have been brought forward.—H. H. RusBY 
[Dr. Rusby is quite justified in claiming misquotation, and I sincerely 
regret having been guilty of giving a false impression of his meaning, through 
My own misapprehension of the chapter criticized. My impression was 
derived from the chapter heading: 
LAWS OF FLORAL STRUCTURE AND THEIR (sic) DEVIATIONS, 
and from the conspicuously printed “ laws,” thus : 
: REGULARITY. — The parts composing one circle are all . the same form 
A flower all of whose circles obey this law is regular.... 
Having examined these various laws and been impressed by their nullity, 
Twas not impressed by the word yfica/, which occurs in two sentences of 
Law 
and size, 
