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TEE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLIII 



not enjoying the privileges of great libraries and labo- 

 ratories. 



That he hovered very close to the edge of discoveries 

 that were reserved for others, is clear to every one 

 familiar with his publications. The effect of foreign 

 pollen in modifying the seed (aside from the embryo) 

 and fruit, was early known to him ; but neither his studies 

 nor those of others in his day were equal to the demon- 

 stration of double fertilization— even as to-day we go no 

 further than the endosperm in accounting for these phe- 

 nomena. Even his second botanical paper (1858) de- 

 tailed at length a gardener's observations and his own 

 experiments on a mongrel lot of beans which Darwin 

 had the acuteness to test by growing some of the parent 

 seed as well, and thus to demonstrate that this itself 

 must have been crossed and not pure. Mendel's law— 

 hardly deducible from these facts, but again suggested 

 in his study of the heredity of style- and stamen-length 

 in illegitimate unions of heterogenous species (which he 

 contrasts with hybridization)— escaped him, and the 

 obscurity of its publication seems to have prevented him 

 from enjoying its benefits at all in his analysis of the 

 complex problems of heredity. He was on the verge 

 of knowing the important part that light sometimes plays 

 in the phenomena of germination, but at most barely 

 knew it. To him had not come the fundamental dis- 

 tinction between fluctuating and mutating variations ; and 

 the demonstration that cumulation of the latter and not 

 accretion of the former underlies organic evolution was 

 left for others— to whom the basal mystery of causation 

 is likely long to remain as obscure as it confessedly was 

 to Darwin. Convinced, beyond the possibility of doubt, 

 of the benefits of sexual differentiation with attendant 

 union of elements derived from different individuals, 

 he paused before the question why this differentiation 

 is beneficial up to a certain point and injurious if carried 

 still farther; confessing in candor that he did not know 

 what is the nature or degree of the differentiation, and 



