To Fritz Müller 23 February 1881
Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.)
Feb. 23d 1881
My dear Sir
Your letter has interested me greatly, as have so many during many past years. I thought that you wd. not object to my publishing in Nature some of the more striking facts about the movements of Plants, with a few remarks added to show the bearing of the facts. The case of the Phyllanthus which sometimes turns up its leaves on the wrong side is most extraordinary & ought to be further investigated.1
Do the leaflets sleep on the following night in the usual manner? Do the same leaflets on successive nights move in the same strange manner? I was particularly glad to hear of the strongly marked cases of paraheliotropism.—2 I shall look out with much interest for the publication about the Figs. The creatures which you sketch are marvellous & I shd not have guessed that they were Hymenoptera.3 Thirty or forty years ago I read all that I cd. find about caprification & was utterly puzzled.4 I suggested to Dr. Crüger in Trinidad to investigate the wild figs, in relation to their cross-fertilisation, & just before he died he wrote that he had arrived at some very curious results, but he never published, as I believe on the subject.—5
I am extremely glad that the inundation did not so greatly injure your scientific property; though it would have been a real pleasure to me to have been allowed to have replaced your scientific apparatus.6 I do not believe that there is anyone in the world who admires your zeal in science & wonderful powers of observation more than I do.— I venture to say this, as I feel myself a very old man, who probably will not last much longer.
Believe me, my dear Sir | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin
P.S. With respect to Phyllanthus, I think that it wd. be good experiment to cut off most of the leaflets on one side of petiole, as soon as they are asleep & vertically dependent.— When the pressure is thus removed, the opposite leaflets will perhaps bend beyond their vertically dependent position; if not, the main petiole might be a little twisted so that the upper surfaces of the dependent & now unprotected leaflets shd. face obliquely the sky, when the morning comes. In this case diaheliotropism would perhaps conquer the ordinary movements of the leaves when they awake & resume their diurnal horizontal position.— As the leaflets are alternate & as the upper surface will be somewhat exposed to the dawning light it is perhaps diaheliotropism which explains your extraordinary case.7
Footnotes
Bibliography
Mayer, Paul. 1882a. Zur Naturgeschichte der Feigeninsecten. Mittheilungen aus der Zoologischen Station zu Neapel 3 (1881–2): 551–90.
Movement in plants: The power of movement in plants. By Charles Darwin. Assisted by Francis Darwin. London: John Murray. 1880.
Solms-Laubach, Hermann. 1881a. Die Herkunft, Domestication und Verbreitung des gewöhnlichen Feigenbaums (Ficus Carica L.). [Read 3 December 1881.] Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 27: 1–106.
Summary
CD interested by FM’s facts on movement of plants; has sent some to Nature ["Movement of leaves", Collected papers 2: 228–9]. Greatly admires FM’s work. Suggests an experiment to investigate movement in Phyllanthus.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-13064
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Johann Friedrich Theodor (Fritz) Müller
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- The British Library (Loan MS 10 no 49)
- Physical description
- ALS 6pp †
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13064,” accessed on 21 October 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13064.xml