Se TAPS att Sas ap ta eS ad nee eS 
KT. 52.] TO CHARLES DARWIN. 505 
and passing all your valuable time, wasting it, at a 
water-cure. 
I have really, as you see, nothing special to write 
of this week, and no time to read what I have hur- 
riedly penned. 
May 26. 
Your letter on heterogeny is keen and good ; 
Owen’s rejoinder ingenious. But his dissent from 
your well-put claims of natural selection to attention 
and regard is good for nothing except on the ad- 
mission of the view that species are somehow derived 
genealogically ; and this I judge, from various 0 
Owen’s statements, that he really in his heart believes 
to be the case, and was (as I long ago intimated my 
suspicions) hunting about for some system of deri- 
vation, when your book came down upon him like a 
thunderclap. 
Wyman, here, is greatly pleased with Huxley’s book 
on man’s place in nature. I have not even seen it. 
Did you ever notice how prettily Iris is arranged 
for cross-fertilizing by bees, ete. ? 
Your Linum paper has long been here. But I have 
actually not had time to read it. I might have 
glanced at it. But I find it best to read only when 
I can do so with some attention. 
Phyllotaxis: I have no notion in the-world why the 
angular divergences should be of that series of num- 
bers and not of others. Opposite leaves give (decus- 
sating) the angles. My puzzle has been to account 
for this system in cycles in leaves running into the 
system of decussating whorls in flowers (usually, 
almost universally). You will see the question by 
comparing in my “ Botanical Text-Book” (not “ Les- 
