224 GEOEGE JOHN EOMANES issi- 



tion on plants, I notice that the seedlings, although so 

 wonderfully heliotropic, never form chlorophyll, even 

 if exposed to a continuous stream of sparks for 30 

 hours on end, while they will bend through 90° 

 in seven hours to single sparks following one another 

 at one per second. This proves that there is no con- 

 nection at all between heliotropism and formation of 

 chlorophyll, or vice versa — a point which I cannot 

 find to have been hitherto stated. Do you happen to 

 know if it has been ? If you do not happen to re- 

 member anything bearing on this subject, do not 

 trouble to search or to answer. 



Wallace's book 1 strikes me as very able in many 

 parts, though singularly feeble in others — especially 

 the last chapter. He has done but scant justice to 

 Gulick's paper. Had he read it with any care, he 

 might have seen that it fully anticipates his criticism 

 on mine. But I think he deserves great credit for 

 nowhere chuckling. From the first he has been con- 

 sistent in holding natural selection the sole factor of 

 organic evolution — leaving no room for sexual selec- 

 tion, inheritance of acquired characters, &c, &c. 

 And now that he had lived to see an important 

 body of evolutionists adopting this view, there must 

 have been a strong temptation to ' I always told you 

 so.' Yet there is nowhere any note of this, or even 

 so much as an allusion to his previous utterances on 

 the subject. 



1 Darwinism, by Alfred Eussel Wallace. 



