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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: fact separated sexes, and must habitually be crossed. How strange are
these facts! How strange that the pollen and stigmatic surface of the same
flower, though placed so close together, as if for the very purpose of
self-fertilisation, should in so many cases be mutually useless to each
other! How simply are these facts explained on the view of an occasional
cross with a distinct individual being advantageous or indispensable!
If several varieties of the cabbage, radish, onion, and of some other
plants, be allowed to seed near each other, a large majority, as I have
found, of the seedlings thus raised will turn out mongrels: for instance,
I raised 233 seedling cabbages from some plants of different varieties
growing near each other, and of these only 78 were true to their kind, and
On the Origin of Species |
