Apropos to Heer, you ask me if it is not impossible to imagine so many and nice coadaptations as we see in orchids being formed all by a chance blow.
I reply, Yes, perfectly impossible to imagine (and much the same by any number of chance blows).
So I turn the question back upon you. Is not the fact that the coadaptations are so nice next to a demonstration against their having been formed by chance blows at all, one or many?
Here lies, I suppose, the difference between us. When you bring me up to this point, I feel the cold chill.
I have been doing nothing but attend to my daily work, and had got so fagged that I really thought I was about to have softening of the brain, or some other breakdown. But a week of respite, caused by the death of an aged relative of my wife’s,—a dear old soul,—taking us away from here perforce, has set me up very nearly, and now after a week more comes my vacation, and we are off into the quiet country for three weeks.
A little legacy of about £2,000 to my wife comes in opportunely to relieve us of anxiety for the future. We have no children (which I regret only that I have no son to send to the war), and this with a little income, rather precarious, of about £200 a year would support us in our very simple way, if I were to throw up my place here. But I cannot do that yet....
Look at Impatiens flowers; see if the most fertile “precociously fertilized” ones ever get crossed!
I have asked in three directions for seeds of the Specularia perfoliata. Inclosed are depauperate specimens.
It is pretty to see honey-bees cross-fertilize Locust (Robinia), much as you say of broom. One of my students has been noticing the way bees act on Kalmia.
Now for my best thing for to-day.