To Council of the Royal Horticultural Society 11 April 1864
Cambridge,
April 11, 1864.
Gentlemen,—
We beg respectfully to represent to the Council of the Royal Horticultural Society that serious injury will be caused to the native plants of England by the prizes recently offered by the Society for collections of wild specimens of English plants. But, at the same time, we desire to thank the Society for having shown a wish to promote a knowledge of scientific Botany.1
The value of land, and the advanced state of agriculture consequent therefrom, has caused many wild plants to be now confined to few or even to single localities, often of small extent.2 It is feared that such species will be extirpated by collectors for prize herbaria, who are desirous of obtaining every plant known to grow in their county, and are greatly tempted to destroy what they do not gather, in order to prevent other candidates from finding as many species.3 The plants liable to be thus destroyed are mostly not such as gardeners would wish to obtain for cultivation: they possess no beauty nor interest to the common eye, but are of much value in the estimation of scientific botanists. There is scarcely a county in England in which one or more plants will not be in danger of extirpation by the collectors for these prizes. Neither will the prizes promote scientific botany amongst the class for whose benefit they are intended,4 for there is nothing to ensure the recipient of a prize himself knowing the names or localities of the plants in his collection, or that he has examined a single botanical book, gathered any of the specimens, or even seen any of them. But supposing the case not to be so bad as this, the objection will probably apply, in some degree, to every collection sent to the Society; for no attempt is made (indeed it would be next to impossible) to ensure the collection being really formed, named, mounted and arranged by the candidate himself, without the help of other persons.
As it seems nearly certain that these prizes cannot be of much use in promoting scientific Botany, and must seriously threaten the rare, curious, and botanically interesting plants with extirpation, we venture to express our hope that the Council may be induced to withdraw them before the season has arrived for the destruction to commence.—5
We have the honour to be Gentlemen, your most obedient servants, | Charles C. Babington, Prof. of Bot., Cambridge. | Churchill Babington, B.D., F.L.S. | C. Darwin, M.A., F.R.S.6
Footnotes
Bibliography
Allen, David Elliston. 1969. The Victorian fern craze. A history of pteridomania. London: Hutchinson & Co.
Allen, David Elliston. 1980. The early history of plant conservation in Britain. Transactions of the Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society 72: 35–50.
Allen, David Elliston. 1994. The naturalist in Britain: a social history. 2d edition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Babington, Charles Cardale. 1862. Manual of British botany, containing the flowering plants and ferns arranged according to the natural orders. 5th edition. London: John van Voorst.
Bentham, George. 1858. Handbook of the British flora; a description of the flowering plants and ferns indigenous to, or naturalized in, the British Isles. London: Lovell Reeve.
Kain, Roger J. P. 1986. An atlas and index of the tithe files of mid-nineteenth-century England and Wales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kent, Douglas H. 1986. The Royal Horticultural Society’s herbarium competition: a milestone in botanical conservation. Typescript.
Phillips, Anthony D. M. 1989. The underdraining of farmland in England during the nineteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Secord, Anne. 1994. Corresponding interests: artisans and gentlemen in nineteenth-century natural history. British Journal for the History of Science 27: 383–408.
Summary
The signatories warn the RHS that in offering prizes for collections of specimens of wild English plants, the Society will cause serious injury to varieties already threatened without any real promotion of scientific botany.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-4459F
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Royal Horticultural Society
- Sent from
- Cambridge
- Source of text
- Proceedings of the Royal Horticultural Society 4 (1864): 91–3
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 4459F,” accessed on 19 October 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-4459F.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 12