ABSTRACT
Francis Galton contacted Romanes to ask whether he would still like to continue their collaboration with further experimental work on the subject of heredity. Galton had developed some new and provocative ideas and wanted to discuss them with Romanes who sometimes invited him to stay for a long weekend at his rented country house, the Geanies, in Ross-shire, Scotland. In the meeting Galton started to explain that the gemmule hypothesis (as Charles Darwin would call them) was most likely to be wrong—but perhaps a modification of it may turn out to be correct. Galton's exciting new idea was that the hereditary material might be collected and organized into stirps and each stirp contained the sum total of all the great variety of germs or gemmules. Galton's ideas involved a complete rejection of Darwin's gemmule hypothesis and could be construed as some sort of disloyalty against Darwin's authority.
