494 THE MAKING OF THE ' ORIGIN ' 
believe you are afraid to send me a ripe Edwardsia pod for 
fear I should float it from New Zealand to Chile ! ' ^ And so 
he quickly routs Hooker's cautious scepticism. The latter, 
confident that nothing will happen, has planted some seeds 
that the Gulf Stream has carried across the Atlantic to the 
coast of Norway. They germinate perfectly, and in answer 
to his confession of defeat (the letter is not extant), Darwin 
writes (June 1, 1856) : 
I read your note as far as ' unutterable mortification ' 
and was in despair, for I came instantly to the conclusion 
that probably Government had determined to give up Kew 
Gardens ! and you may imagine how^ I laughed when I came 
to the real cause of mortification. It is the funniest thing in 
the world that you do not rejoice ; for you have (as I never 
have) put in print that you do not believe in multiple crea- 
tion, and therefore you surely should rejoice at every conceiv- 
able means of dispersal. Well, I and my wife have enjoyed 
a jolly laugh, and all the more from fully believing for a 
second that some great calamity had befallen you. 
To quote a few more of the points with which the letters 
teem : Does the evidence show that in plants as in animals 
variabiHty increases in parts which are abnormally developed ? 
Do experiments in the Kew greenhouses show that cross 
fertihsation improves the fertihty of the plant ? Do statistics 
indicate that trees, where the abundance of adjacent blossom 
would tend to self -fertilisation, counteract this tendency by 
being more often dioecious than other plants ? TOiat of 
hybridism in botany ; or of the part played by insects in 
fertilisation ? On what definition does a botanist rank a class 
of plants as high or low in the scale, and how is competitive 
highness measured, i.e. that superiority in development which 
enables, say, the recent forms of Europe and Asia to oust 
Australian forms when they meet, especially as some par- 
ticular adaptations in a ' high ' class represent a retrogression 
according to the usual standard, which measures ' highness ' 
* The plant is only found in these two countries. It was shown that legu- 
minous seeds as a rule were destroyed by immersion, thus suggesting a reason 
for the peculiarities in the distribution of the Leguminosae. 
