sterile
race! I do not know whether these are the kinds of facts which you
require.

Think whether you can help me to seed or better seedlings (not cuttings)
of any Melastomad.

LETTER 629. TO F. MULLER. Down, March 20th, 1881.

I have received the seeds and your most interesting letter of February
7th. The seeds shall be sown, and I shall like to see the plants
sleeping; but I doubt whether I shall make any more detailed
observations on this subject, as, now that I feel very old, I require
the stimulus of some novelty to make me work. This stimulus you
have amply given me in your remarkable view of the meaning of the
two-coloured stamens in many flowers. I was so much struck with this
fact with Lythrum, that I began experimenting on some Melastomaceae,
which have two sets of extremely differently coloured anthers. After
reading your letter I turned to my notes (made 20 years ago!) to see
whether they would support or contradict your suggestion. I cannot tell
yet, but I have come across one very remarkable result, that seedlings
from the crimson anthers were not 11/20ths of the size of seedlings from
the yellow anthers of the same flowers. Fewer good seeds were produced
by the crimson pollen. I concluded that the shorter stamens were
aborting, and that the pollen was not good. (629/1. "Shorter stamens"
seems to be a slip of the pen for "longer,"--unless the observations
were made on some genus in which the structure is unusual.) The mature
pollen is incoherent, and must be [word illegible] against the visiting
insect's body. I remembered this, and I find it said in my EARLY
notes that bees would never visit the flowers for pollen. This made
me afterwards write to the late Dr. Cruger in the West Indies, and he
observed for me the flowers, and saw bees pressing the anthers with
their mandibles from the base upwards, and this forced a worm-like
thread of pollen from the terminal pore, and this pollen the bees
collected with their hind legs. So that the Melastomads are not opposed
to your views.

I am now working on the habits of worms, and it tires me much to change
my subject; so I will lay on one side your letter and my notes, until I
have a week's leisure, and will then see whether my facts bear on your
views. I will then send a letter to "Nature" or to the Linn. Soc., with
the extract of your letter (and this ought to appear in any case), with
my own observations, if they appear worth publishing. The subject had