... Curious that one species should take pains to close fertilize some flowers, the other to cross all....
Now I want to beg of you to consider about a name for this kind of thing, on which, as a good judge, you could consult Bentham, or indeed, Hooker, if he can give it attention.
This matter will need to come into generic or specific characters, and therefore wants a terse and unambiguous mode of expression in a single word.
My old expression thirty or so years ago, “diœciodimorphous,” you reasonably objected to, implying separation of sexes (which, though, it need not do).
Yours of “dimorphous” should be, as the lawyers say, void for vagueness, there being plenty of other kinds of dimorphism in flowers.
Hildebrand’s, of “heterostylous,” the difference being in other things as well as style, and, I think, possible sometimes not in the style. The term will not work well in characters, whether in Latin or English. I have proposed, accordingly, in a little article not yet published, to use the term “heterogone,” in other form “heterogonous,” in Latin “Flores heterogoni,” with the counterpart “homogone,” “homogonous,” “Flores homogoni.”
This means, you see, explicitly, diverse genitalia, and the [Greek: gonê] is used as in the common botanical term “perigonium.”
TO R. W. CHURCH.
February 5, 1877.
Your friend Lord Blachford is an unrivaled expositor. I have just been reading, with extreme satisfaction, his article on the Reality of Duty. That naturally brought you to mind, and I vowed I would no longer be so negligent, but would acknowledge and thank you for your letter of August last, and for Professor Mozley’s sermons. They are excellent indeed, and it is saddening to have a man of such insight laid aside by illness, of a sort which probably does not diminish his desire, but destroys his power, to work....