Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

ANTS AND PLANT-STRUCTURE 411
and perhaps also in some cases to its flowers as
shown by Kerner by the presence of whole armies
of -
virulently stinging ants whose very minuteness
renders them the more formidable. In the
most remarkable plant-formicaria known those of
the Myrmecodia and Hydnophytum of the Malay
Archipelago the whole structure has been proved
to be hereditary, and we may therefore conclude
that in the Tococas of the Amazon, and other cases
in which the cavities inhabited by the ants are
constantly present, they are also hereditary. In
other cases, as Spruce himself states, they are
not so, being directly formed by the ants or being
abnormal growths due to their irritations.
Spruce's error was in not recognising
that the
ever-present variability in all the parts and organs
of plants furnished the material, and the survival of
the fittest the agency, by which these, as well as all
other specific modifications of plants, have been
that this is a far more powerful,
brought about ; and
as well as a more exact and certain, mode of doing
so than the hereditary transmission of mutilations,
the effects of which would in many cases be the
reverse of beneficial.
In my recent work, My Life (vol. ii.
p. 64), I
give a letter from Spruce written shortly after the
paper was rejected, in which he explains his reasons
for refusing to alter his paper. Three years later
he wrote me another letter on an allied subject
the purport of aromatic leaves (printed at p. 65),
"
at the commencement of which he : says Every
structure, every secretion of a plant is (before all)
beneficial to the plant itself. That is, I suppose, an
incontrovertible axiom."