My Dear Sir

My good neighbour M^r. Joseph Rosengarten wrote to me last Summer that you had expressed a wish to have Photographs of myself and Prof. Cope, and he very kindly enclosed two of yours, which I need not say both Prof. Cope and myself highly value. I returned mine at once to M^r. Rosengarten, and I suppose you have received it. At the time Prof. Cope was with a Government expedition to Wyoming, and has only recently returned. His Photograph also exhibits one of his discoveries of which he is very proud.¹

I was very much pleased to learn from your letter a few years ago that the occasional observations I am able to make interest you.² They give me pleasure to make them, and I never forget while enjoying this study, how much I owe to you as in a great measure the instigator of the line of thought. I only feel sorry sometimes in this account, that while aiding as I think my observations do, the facts of a continuous evolution of species and genera, I cannot feel that natural selection is an adequate cause,— nor do I feel satisfied with Prof. Copes law of acceleration and retardation as developed in his origin of Genera.³ Indeed when I see how vast is the change in plants by a simple cohesion of parts in plants,—and how easily this co-hesion is affected by mere powers of nutrition—especially in Orchidaceæ, I cannot see any genera at all in nature, so far as plants are concerned, whatever the zoologist may do. Feeling my inability to be satisfied as yet of any theory of Evolution, I am contenting myself with the position of an original observer, recording whatever seems true, and which fact sometimes helps one side as well as another.

In my paper on the laws of sex, read at the Salem meeting of the American Association,— and a paper at the Troy meeting on nutrition and sex, I incidentally referred to the association of high color with the male sex in plants.⁴ I have since made many more observations on the same subject, showing that with a decline in vigor (vitality) there is an appreciation of high colour, and with that high color, a gradual decline of the female characteristic of flowers, and an assumption of male ones.

If you have an opportunity of watching the growth of Delachampsia Roezeliana,⁵ you may perhaps get an idea of what I mean. I try to carry the idea of color as explained by you and M^r. Wallace with my observations;⁶ but they do not seem to fit exactly. In a year or so I may report— I fear not this, as I am arranging for a trip of some seven thousand miles through this great country the coming summer.

I mail you a paper of mine you may not have seen, in “Old and New” on sex.⁷ It is not intended for Scientific people, hence, is not written as I would in other events.

Very truly yours Tho^s. Meehan