series of cold seasons would bring about such a change in an individual
quadruped, just as rowing will harden hands, etc.") I fancied a bud lived
only a year, and you could hardly expect any change in that time; but if
you call a tree or plant an individual, you have sporting buds. Perhaps
you mean that the whole tree does not change. Tulips, in "breaking,"
change. Fruit seems certainly affected by the stock. I think I have
(135/3. See note, Letter 16.) got cases of slight change in alpine plants
transplanted. All these subjects have rather gone out of my head owing to
orchids, but I shall soon have to enter on them in earnest when I come
again to my volume on variation under domestication.

...In the lifetime of an animal you would, I think, find it very difficult
to show effects of external condition on animals more than shade and light,
good and bad soil, produce on a plant.

You speak of "an inherent tendency to vary wholly independent of physical
conditions"! This is a very simple way of putting the case (as Dr. Prosper
Lucas also puts it) (135/4. Prosper Lucas, the author of "Traite
philosophique et physiologique de l'heredite naturelle dans les etats de
sante et de maladie du systeme nerveux": 2 volumes, Paris, 1847-50.): but
two great classes of facts make me think that all variability is due to
change in the conditions of life: firstly, that there is more variability
and more monstrosities (and these graduate into each other) under unnatural
domestic conditions than under nature; and, secondly, that changed
conditions affect in an especial manner the reproductive organs--those
organs which are to produce a new being. But why one seedling out of
thousands presents some new character transcends the wildest powers of
conjecture. It was in this sense that I spoke of "climate," etc., possibly
producing without selection a hooked seed, or any not great variation.
(135/5. This statement probably occurs in a letter, and not in Darwin's