that I doubted it, for,
differently from my general habit, I have not extracted his grounds.
It was meeting with Barneoud's paper which made me think there might be
truth in the doctrine. (52/2. Apparently Barneoud "On the Organogeny
of Irregular Corollas," from the "Comptes rendus," 1847, as given in
"Annals and Mag. of Natural History," 1847, page 440. The paper chiefly
deals with the fact that in their earliest condition irregular flowers
are regular. The view attributed to Barneoud does not seem so definitely
given in this paper as in a previous one ("Ann. Sc. Nat." Bot., Tom.
VI., page 268.) Your instance of heart and brain of fish seems to me
very good. It was a very stupid blunder on my part not thinking of
the posterior part of the time of development. I shall, of course, not
allude to this subject, which I rather grieve about, as I wished it
to be true; but, alas! a scientific man ought to have no wishes, no
affections--a mere heart of stone.

There is only one point in your letter which at present I cannot quite
follow you in: supposing that Barneoud's (I do not say Brulle's) remarks
were true and universal--i.e., that the petals which have to undergo
the greatest amount of development and modification begin to change the
soonest from the simple and common embryonic form of the petal--if this
were a true law, then I cannot but think that it would throw light on
Milne Edwards' proposition that the wider apart the classes of animals
are, the sooner do they diverge from the common embryonic plan--which
common embryonic [plan] may be compared with the similar petals in
the early bud, the several petals in one flower being compared to the
distinct but similar embryos of the different classes. I much wish that
you would so far keep this in mind, that whenever we meet I might hear
how far you differ or concur in this. I have always looked at Barneoud's
and Brulle's proposition as only in some degree analogous.

P.S. I see in my abstract of Milne Edwards' paper, he speaks of "the
most perfect and important organs" as being first developed, and I
should have thought that this was usually synonymous with the most
developed or modified.

LETTER 53. TO J.D. HOOKER.

(53/1. The following letter is chiefly of interest as showing the amount
and kind of work required for Darwin's conclusions on "large genera
varying," which occupy no more than two or three pages in the "Origin"
(Edition I., page 55). Some correspondence