CHAPTER XXII 
MISCELLANEOUS, 1850-18G0 
Several letters bear on his methods of work and illustrate 
his tendency to bring anomalies under established principles 
instead of inventing new principles to suit the exception ; 
his passion to verify things for himself ; his critical frankness 
in dealing with ill-founded ideas combined with readiness 
to accept well-founded criticism. Others are of personal 
interest. 
Kcw : Wednesday, Sept. 20, 1854. 
Dear Bentham, — I have just been examining a mon- 
strous Stachys sylvatica with a long 4-lobed ovary consist- 
ing of 2 fore and aft carpels, i.e. one carpel with its back 
to axis and 4 parietal ovules in pairs at the sutures, thus 
{diagram). 
I think this reduces your Labiatae to the ordinary type 
of carpellary structure. Was it not you ? who once quoted 
Labiatae to me as opposed to Brown's marginal carpellary 
theory of origin of ovules ? 
I am a far better Tory than you are and Hke laws. I 
on principle object to nature having one law for carpellary 
produced ovules and another for free central ones. I would 
rather go the whole hog and call all placentation axial and 
all ovules produced on the axis, or adnate portions of it, 
or branched adnate portions of it, running along edges of 
carpellary leaves, than to hold to one law for the majority 
of plants and take another for the exceptions. In Botany 
there are no end to the ' morphological differentiations ' 
(as Von Baer calls them in Zoology) which result in the 
most complete congenital obliteration of all traces of original 
VOL. I 421 • 2 E 
